Abstract
Interruptions occur frequently in spontaneous conversations, and they are often associated with changes in the flow of conversation. Predicting interruption is essential in the design of natural human-machine spoken dialog interface. The modeling can bring insights into the dynamics of human-human conversation. This work utilizes Hidden Condition Random Field (HCRF) to predict occurrences of interruption in dyadic spoken interactions by modeling both speakers' behaviors before a turn change takes place. Our prediction model, using both the foreground speaker's acoustic cues and the listener's gestural cues, achieves an F-measure of 0.54, accuracy of 70.68%, and unweighted accuracy of 66.05% on a multimodal database of dyadic interactions. The experimental results also show that listener's behaviors provides an indication of his/her intention of interruption. ©2010 IEEE.