@inproceedings{jeon-choi-2026-personakit,
    title = "{P}ersona{K}it ({PK}): A Plug-and-Play Platform for User Testing Diverse Roles in Simulated Full-Duplex Dialogue",
    author = "Jeon, Hyunbae  and
      Choi, Jinho D.",
    editor = "Choi, Jinho D.  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung  and
      Funakoshi, Kotaro  and
      Emami, Ali",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = aug,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Atlanta, Georgia, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/paragraph-normalization/2026.sigdial-1.42/",
    pages = "597--601",
    abstract = "As spoken dialogue systems take on diverse personas{---}authoritative instructors, uncooperative merchants, distracted workers{---}they need distinct, human-like turn-taking to stay immersive. Yet current full-duplex systems default to a rigid ``always-yield'' policy during overlap, undermining character consistency for non-submissive roles, and evaluating persona-specific alternatives through user studies demands substantial real-time engineering. We present PersonaKit (PK), an open-source, low-latency web platform that simulates full-duplex turn-taking pragmatics{---}via a cascade pipeline and prompt-level control rather than a jointly trained speak-while-listening model. Through intuitive JSON configurations, researchers define personas, specify probabilistic interruption handling (yield, hold, bridge, override), and auto-deploy comparative A/B surveys. An in-the-wild evaluation with 8 personas shows that PK is an extensible, end-to-end framework for studying complex sociolinguistic behaviors in next-generation spoken agents."
}