Journal article
Who Spoke Next Is Not Who Should Have: What Zero-Shot Failure on Multi-Party Turn-Taking Benchmarks Measures, Why the Human Reference Sits Beside the Models, and What Would Show That Knowing When to Speak Must Be Trained
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. An assistant that joins a group conversation has to decide, at every pause, whether to take the floor. Two 2026 benchmarks report that language models prompted zero-shot make this decision badly and that fine-tuning repairs it, and both…