Gaze and Conversation Dominance in Multiparty Interaction

With the goal of designing conversational agents that can join and manage conversations with multiple participants, in this paper, we conduct an experiment to collect multiparty conversations with a virtual agent, and recognize head direction as each participant’s focus of attention. Then, we analyze how gaze and mutual gaze affect floor management and conversation dominance; we assumed that the most dominant participant may control the participation framework and lead the conversation to make a decision. Based on the analysis, we found that turn-releasing success ratio is different depending on the levels of conversation dominance. We also found that the frequency of gaze and mutual gaze are different depending on the participation roles and conversation dominance. These results suggest that gaze behaviors are strongly related to conversation dominance, and may become a good predictor of dominance in multiparty conversations. Author