@inproceedings{skantze-2017-towards,
    title = "Towards a General, Continuous Model of Turn-taking in Spoken Dialogue using {LSTM} Recurrent Neural Networks",
    author = "Skantze, Gabriel",
    editor = "Jokinen, Kristiina  and
      Stede, Manfred  and
      DeVault, David  and
      Louis, Annie",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Annual {SIG}dial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = aug,
    year = "2017",
    address = {Saarbr{\"u}cken, Germany},
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W17-5527/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W17-5527",
    pages = "220--230",
    abstract = "Previous models of turn-taking have mostly been trained for specific turn-taking decisions, such as discriminating between turn shifts and turn retention in pauses. In this paper, we present a predictive, continuous model of turn-taking using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The model is trained on human-human dialogue data to predict upcoming speech activity in a future time window. We show how this general model can be applied to two different tasks that it was not specifically trained for. First, to predict whether a turn-shift will occur or not in pauses, where the model achieves a better performance than human observers, and better than results achieved with more traditional models. Second, to make a prediction at speech onset whether the utterance will be a short backchannel or a longer utterance. Finally, we show how the hidden layer in the network can be used as a feature vector for turn-taking decisions in a human-robot interaction scenario."
}