ECHO: A Matched-Contrast Benchmark for Context-Sensitive Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Dialogue
ECHO benchmark pairs identical-overlap Chinese dialogue examples with contrasting contexts, revealing most full-duplex systems bias toward yielding the floor.
ECHO is a paired diagnostic benchmark for Chinese full-duplex turn-taking that matches examples with identical overlap transcripts but contrasting preceding multi-turn contexts, one requiring Yield and the other Keep. It also includes off-talk examples for diagnosing unnecessary yielding and introduces pair accuracy, which grants no credit to constant-action policies. Experiments across multiple full-duplex systems show most exhibit a pronounced Yield bias, performing substantially better on interruptions than backchannels. The benchmark and metadata will be publicly released.
- Paired examples share overlap transcript but require opposite Yield/Keep decisions
- Pair accuracy metric defeats constant-action policies
- Most systems biased toward Yield; better on interruptions than backchannels
- Off-talk examples diagnose unnecessary yielding
Full article145 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems must distinguish interruptions that require yielding the floor from backchannels that permit continued speaking. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate events independently and may therefore reward fixed action preferences rather than context-sensitive decisions. We introduce ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for Chinese full-duplex turn-taking. ECHO pairs examples with the same overlap transcript but contrasting preceding multi-turn dialogue contexts, with one requiring Yield and the other Keep. It additionally includes off-talk examples for diagnosing unnecessary yielding. We introduce pair accuracy, which requires correct decisions on both members of a pair and assigns no credit to constant-action policies. Experiments on multiple full-duplex systems show that most exhibit a pronounced bias toward \textsc{Yield}, performing substantially better on interruptions than on backchannels, while another system remains comparatively balanced. These findings demonstrate that interruption-only evaluation can overestimate practical turn-taking reliability. ECHO and its metadata will be publicly released.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17360