Modeling Individuals and Groups in Face-to-Face Interactions

In our paper, we showed how we can use some simple social signals, the speaking activity, to reconstruct disparate and diverse aspects of social and individual life ranging from the functional roles played by the participants in a meeting to static characteristics of individuals (personality traits). To our knowledge, our paper is also the first one that tries to reconstruct some relevant individual characteristics of the meeting participants starting from their high-level relational behaviors (role-taking dynamics). 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The focus of our paper is about the modeling of a group discussion process in which group participants present their opinions, argue on some issues, and try to reach a consensus. As result, we could expect to find some invariant structures and to answering, by just observing the discussion dynamics, to the following issues: (i) which are the roles played by the meeting participants; and (ii) which are the psychological profiles of the participants. We limit ourselves to the consideration of small group meetings as a challenging example of real life situations in which the multimodal analysis of social signals can be used to extract relevant information about the group and the individuals. In particular, we show how some simple social signals [6] can be used to reconstruct apparently disparate and diverse aspects of social and individual life ranging from the functional roles played by the participants in a meeting to static characteristics of individuals (personality traits). Our tasks involve individual and social constructs with different characteristics: for example, roles and personality traits have different temporal properties, with traits being stable over time and a definitional property of the behavior of a given individual; and roles, in turn, change dynamically inside a given face-to-face interaction. 2 M i s s i o n S u r v i v a l C o r p o r a The Mission Survival corpus is a multimodal corpus of meetings where groups of four people, seated around a table, are involved in solving the Mission Survival Task (MST). The Mission Survival [4] is a task often used in social psychology to elicit decision-making processes in small groups. The exercise consists in promoting group discussion by asking participants to reach a consensus on how to survive in a disaster scenario. The group has to rank a number (15) of items according to their importance for crew members survival.!In our work, we used two Mission Survival (MS) corpora. The Mission Survival 1 (MS1) corpus and the Mission Survival 2 (MS2) corpus consist of audio and video recordings of 8 meetings and of 12 meetings, respectively. For both the corpora, audio is recorded through close-talk microphones worn by each participant, and through one omni-directional microphone placed in the middle of the table. The visual recording equipment consists of five Firewire cameras, four placed in the corners of the room and one directly above the table, and four web cameras installed on the meeting table. In MS1, the eight meetings are Workshop on Modeling Human Communication Dynamics at NIPS 2010 Page 26