} Predicting who will speak next, and when, is a prerequisite for conversational agents and social robots that take turns without waiting for silence. Multiparty next-speaker prediction (NSP) has been studied on corpora with per-speaker sensors, each with its own event definitions. No public benchmark covers the single camera and microphone a robot has, and no model has been compared against how well people perform the same prediction. We turn AVCC, a 31-hour audio-visual corpus of two- and three-speaker online conversation recorded with a single static camera and microphone, into a public NSP benchmark. We add a speaker-disjoint seven-video test partition with 865 hold and 865 shift events at mutual-silence gaps, word-level forced-aligned transcripts for the whole corpus, and a human reference benchmark collected at the same events. We score an audio-only Role-Relative VAP model (RoleVAP) and the multimodal MuVAP model. Labels, transcripts, per-response human data, and the scripts that reproduce every number are released.
Yu Wang, Leyi Lao, Langchu Huang, Gabriel Skantze KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, Yang Xu Southern University of Science and Technology, Hendrik Buschmeier Universität Bielefeld
原文摘要
Backchannels and fillers are important linguistic expressions in dialogue, but often treated as “noise” to be bypassed in modern transformer-based language models. Our work studies the representation of them in language models using three fine-tuning strategies. The models are trained on three dialogue corpora in English and Japanese, where backchannels and fillers are preserved and annotated, to investigate how fine-tuning can help LMs learn their representations. We first apply clustering analysis to the learnt representation of backchannels and fillers, and have found increased silhouette scores in representations from fine-tuned models, which suggests that fine-tuning enables LMs to distinguish the nuanced semantic variation in different backchannel and filler use. We also use natural language generation (NLG) metrics and qualitative analysis to confirm that the utterances generated by fine-tuned language models resemble human-produced utterances more closely. Our findings suggest the potentials of transforming general LMs into conversational LMs that are more capable of producing human-like languages adequately.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Livia Qian, Gabriel Skantze KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
原文摘要
Backchannels (e.g., ‘yeah’, ‘mhm’, and ‘right’) are short, non-interruptive feedback signals whose lexical form and prosody jointly convey pragmatic meaning. While prior computational research has largely focused on predicting backchannel timing, the relationship between lexico-prosodic form and meaning remains underexplored. We propose a two-stage framework: first, fine-tuning large language models on dialogue transcripts to derive rich contextual representations; and second, learning a joint embedding space for dialogue contexts and backchannel realizations. We evaluate alignment with human perception via triadic similarity judgments (prosodic and cross-lexical) and a context–backchannel suitability task. Our results demonstrate that the learned projections substantially improve context-backchannel retrieval compared to previous methods. In addition, they reveal that backchannel form is highly sensitive to extended conversational context and that the learned embeddings align more closely with human judgments than raw WavLM features.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表