# Using Semantic Uncertainty to Estimate Transition Relevance in Turn-taking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10934 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10934/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [Do Prompt-Based Models Really Understand the Meaning of their Prompts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01247/) (2021)
- [Kernel Language Entropy: Fine-grained Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs from Semantic Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20003/) (2024)
- [ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14688/) (2023)
- [SpokenWOZ: A Large-Scale Speech-Text Benchmark for Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13040/) (2023)
- [Voice Activity Projection: Self-supervised Learning of Turn-taking Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09812/) (2022)
- [TurnGPT: a Transformer-based Language Model for Predicting Turn-taking in Spoken Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10874/) (2020)
- [Talking Turns: Benchmarking Audio Foundation Models on Turn-Taking Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01174/) (2025)
- [Beyond Semantic Entropy: Boosting LLM Uncertainty Quantification with Pairwise Semantic Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00245/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06487/) (2024)
- [Turn-taking and Backchannel Prediction with Acoustic and Large Language Model Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14717/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Know What To Say But Not When To Speak](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16044/) (2024)
- [The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15493/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Turn-taking is a fundamental mechanism that governs when interlocutors speak and listen. Although Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) exploit a range of linguistic, acoustic, and non-verbal cues, they produce ill-timed responses in unscripted interaction. A central challenge is anticipating Transition Relevance Places (TRPs), or opportunities, not obligations, for a listener to take the floor. Human listeners do not wait for turn endings; as an utterance unfolds, they use expectations about its developing meaning to anticipate TRPs and decide whether to take the floor. We examine whether these evolving expectations can be modeled through semantic uncertainty -- an LLM-derived measure of how strongly a turn so far constrains what may plausibly come next. To do so, we sample possible continuations of an ongoing turn and use changes in semantic dispersion to identify TRPs within turns. We evaluate this account on a dataset with TRP labels derived from real-time listener responses, rather than retrospective annotation. Our approach substantially outperforms prompt-based and fine-tuned text-only baselines, providing empirical support for the view that evolving semantic constraints inform perceived turn-taking opportunities in unscripted interaction.