Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection

Koji Inoue, Bing’er Jiang, Erik Ekstedt, Tatsuya Kawahara, Gabriel Skantze

Abstract
This paper investigates the application of voice activity projection (VAP), a predictive turn-taking model for spoken dialogue, on multilingual data, encompassing English, Mandarin, and Japanese. The VAP model continuously predicts the upcoming voice activities of participants in dyadic dialogue, leveraging a cross-attention Transformer to capture the dynamic interplay between participants. The results show that a monolingual VAP model trained on one language does not make good predictions when applied to other languages. However, a multilingual model, trained on all three languages, demonstrates predictive performance on par with monolingual models across all languages. Further analyses show that the multilingual model has learned to discern the language of the input signal. We also analyze the sensitivity to pitch, a prosodic cue that is thought to be important for turn-taking. Finally, we compare two different audio encoders, contrastive predictive coding (CPC) pre-trained on English, with a recent model based on multilingual wav2vec 2.0 (MMS).
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1036
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
11873–11883
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1036
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Koji Inoue, Bing’er Jiang, Erik Ekstedt, Tatsuya Kawahara, and Gabriel Skantze. 2024. Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11873–11883, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection (Inoue et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.lrec-main.1036.pdf
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