HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau...

Data from four merge locations in northern California and Toronto, Canada unveil a notable feature of driver turn taking. We have observed that queued vehicles from the on-ramp and freeway traffic streams enter a congested merge in some (nearly) fixed ratio, independent of the merge outflow. Drivers in competing traffic streams thus enter the merge by adopting some definite turn-taking behavior...

Stochastic turn-taking models provide stationary estimates of the probability of a conversant’s incipient speech activity, given their own and their interlocutors’ recent speech activity. Existing research suggests that such models may be conversantspecific, and even conversant-discriminative. The present work establishes this explicitly. It is shown that: (1) the conditioning context can be re...

Substantial research effort has been invested in recent decades into the computational study and automatic processing of multi-party conversation. While most aspects of conversational speech have benefited from a wide availability of analytic, computationally tractable techniques, only qualitative assessments are available for characterizing multi-party turn-taking. The current paper attempts t...

This work explores the timing of very short utterances in conversations, as well as the effects of excluding intervals adjacent to such utterances from distributions of betweenspeaker interval durations. The results show that very short utterances are more precisely timed to the preceding utterance than longer utterances in terms of a smaller variance and a larger proportion of no-gap-no-overla...

This study investigates the relationship between the variability in the temporal alignment of turn initiations and the pragmatics of interpersonal communication. The data come from spontaneous, task-oriented dialogues in Standard American English. In addition to analyzing the temporal aspects of turn-taking behavior in general, we focus on the timing of turn-initial single word grounding respon...

Today there are solutions for some specific turn-taking problems, but no general model. We show how turn-taking can be reduced to two more general problems, prediction and selection. We also discuss the value of predicting not only future speech/silence but also prosodic features, thereby handing not only turn-taking but “turn-shaping”. To illustrate how such predictions can be made, we trained...

A widely used method for finding places to take turn in spoken dialogue systems is to assume that an utterance ends where the user ceases to speak. Such endpoint detection normally triggers on a certain amount of silence, or non-speech. However, spontaneous speech frequently contains silent pauses inside sentence-like units, for example when the speaker hesitates. This paper presents /nailon/, ...

This paper reports an investigation of the turn-taking functions of drawings in graphical communication. Based on the examination of dialogue data collected that involve collaborative drawing interactions, as well as spoken dialogue interactions, in a joint problem solving task, we found that ‘drawing turns,’ in which the drawer presents a piece of information to her partner through drawing, ha...