1. A method comprising: receiving, via an interactive turn-taking spoken dialog system speech from a user as part of a conversation with the interactive turn-taking spoken dialog system, wherein the speech comprises at least two words; performing a partial speech recognition prior to completion of the speech by: identifying a starting point associated with the speech, the starting point being at a first time; identifying content of the speech received between the first time and a second time, to yield identified content; identifying an intermediary end point associated with the speech corresponding to the second time, wherein the intermediary end point is a pinch node in a content lattice; and returning, via the interactive turn-taking spoken dialog system, a partial recognition of the identified content based on the starting point and the intermediary end point to yield partially recognized speech, wherein the partial recognition is based on a stability of the identified content between the starting point and the intermediary end point, the stability being based on a stability probability determined using a machine learning algorithm on a corpus of speech utterances; and presenting, via the interactive turn-taking spoken dialog system, the user with a response to the partially recognized speech.