Overlapping speech analysis in Slovak conversational interactions

Overlapping speech is a situation when more than one dialogue interlocutors speak simultaneously. Such situations are common in the human-human conversations and are located during turn-shifts as a result of cooperative or competitive interruption of the current speaker by the listener. From the human-machine speech communication point of view, understanding of mechanisms behind overlaps can help to make turn taking more rapid and human-like. We analyzed the corpus of human-human discussions in Slovak language and all overlapping segments were manually labeled with the interaction intent of the interrupting utterance. Especially, we focused on the duration of analyzed overlaps to observe patterns related to the concrete interaction intentions. Our aim is to bring new findings, which can be used in the automatic classification of interruption intentions.