Analysing the role of lexical and temporal information in turn-taking through predictability

Sean Leishman, Sarenne Wallbridge, Peter Bell


Abstract
Turn-taking is a fundamental component of human communication and is signalled through complex cues distributed across lexical, temporal, and prosodic information. Full-duplex models of spoken dialogue integrate these information sources to produce impressive turn-taking behaviour. Yet, existing evaluations of their turn-taking capabilities do not address which information sources drive predictions.We present a systematic analysis of the role of lexical-temporal features on the predictability of turn structure by examining PairwiseTurnGPT, a full-duplex model of spoken dialogue transcripts. Through PCA, mixed-effects modelling, and temporal surprisal analysis, we reveal context-dependent patterns: linguistic fluency paradoxically creates overconfidence at intermediate completion points, while turn-shift overlap dominates boundary detection. Our findings uncover where lexical-temporal information suffices and where additional cues become necessary, establishing a deeper understanding of how turn-taking cues are distributed and how to evaluate dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.283
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5998–6009
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.283/
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Cite (ACL):
Sean Leishman, Sarenne Wallbridge, and Peter Bell. 2026. Analysing the role of lexical and temporal information in turn-taking through predictability. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5998–6009, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analysing the role of lexical and temporal information in turn-taking through predictability (Leishman et al., EACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.283.pdf