A Multimodal Analysis of Floor Control in Meetings

The participant in a human-to-human communication who controls the floor bears the burden of moving the communication process along. Change in control of the floor can happen through a number of mechanisms, including interruptions, delegation of the floor, and so on. This paper investigates floor control in multiparty meetings that are both audio and video taped; hence, we analyze patterns of speech (e.g., the use of discourse markers) and visual cues (e.g, eye gaze exchanges) that are often involved in floor control changes. Identifying who has control of the floor provides an important focus for information retrieval and summarization of meetings. Additionally, without understanding who has control of the floor, it is impossible to identify important events such as challenges for the floor. In this paper, we analyze multimodal cues related to floor control in two different meetings involving five participants each.