SpeakerTurn: Target-Speaker Semantic Turn Detection in Multi-Speaker Environments
Semantic completeness alone cannot determine when an assistant should respond in a multi-speaker environment: a completed utterance may belong to an interfering speaker, while the designated user is still speaking, acknowledging, or requesting time. We therefore study semantic turn inference conditioned on speaker identity. We propose SpeakerTurn, a framework that jointly predicts the target transcript and turn state from a speech mixture and an independent target-speaker reference. Built on CocktailASR-1, it links semantic decisions to the corresponding target content through joint supervision, distinguishing complete, incomplete, backchannel, wait, and target-absent states, with a separate interruption task. We also examine whether structured chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision improves decisions by representing speaker presence and semantic cues. On a synthetic multi-speaker test set, SpeakerTurn achieves five-state macro F1 of 0.811 and target-transcription character error rate (CER) of 4.20%, correctly resolving all ten reference-swapped interruption pairs. Joint-format transcription and native-interface recognition nevertheless behave differently, and CoT improves validation transcription without improving turn macro F1. These results show why target attribution, semantic turn discrimination, and recognition retention require separate assessment when adapting speech language models for speaker-conditioned interaction.