Measuring Turn-Taking Offsets in Human-Human Dialogues

This paper examines the pauses, gaps and overlaps associated with turn-taking in order to better understand how people engage in this activity, which should lead to more natural and effective spoken dialogue systems. This paper makes three advances in studying these durations. First, we take into account the type of turn-taking event, carefully treating interruptions, dual starts, and delayed backchannels, as these can make it appear that turn-taking is more disorderly than it really is. Second, we do not view turn-transitions in isolation, but consider turntransitions and turn-continuations together, as equal alternatives of what could have occurred. Third, we use the distributions of turn-transition and turn-continuation offsets (gaps, overlaps, and pauses) to shed light on the extent to which turn-taking is negotiated by the two conversants versus controlled by the current speaker.