The Duration of a Turn Cannot be Used to Predict When It Ends

Charles Threlkeld, Jp de Ruiter


Abstract
Turn taking in conversation is a complex process. We still don’t know how listeners are able to anticipate the end of a speaker’s turn. Previous work focuses on prosodic, semantic, and non-verbal cues that a turn is coming to an end. In this paper, we look at simple measures of duration — time, word count, and syllable count — to see if we can exploit the duration of turns as a cue. We find strong evidence that these metrics are useless.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigdial-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Edinburgh, UK
Editors:
Oliver Lemon, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Junyi Jessy Li, Arash Ashrafzadeh, Daniel Hernández Garcia, Malihe Alikhani, David Vandyke, Ondřej Dušek
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
361–367
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Charles Threlkeld and Jp de Ruiter. 2022. The Duration of a Turn Cannot be Used to Predict When It Ends. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 361–367, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Duration of a Turn Cannot be Used to Predict When It Ends (Threlkeld & de Ruiter, SIGDIAL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2022.sigdial-1.35.pdf
Video:
 https://youtu.be/pjOECUyktkw