In You We Follow: Determining the Group Leader in Dialogue

In this paper, we investigate whether the social roles of dialogue participants can be recognized through the social actions performed by the participant in their interactions with others in the group. Specifically we focus on determining if a participant is the leader of the group. We decompose the problem into identifying the social goals for participant discourse segments. These social goals are represented through a set of eleven psychologically-motivated social acts. We then model leadership using a sociological-inspired model called social rank which takes into account the social capital accumulated by the participant over the course of a single dialogue. We explore these models in task-oriented dialogues communicated in English, Arabic, and Chinese and show that the incorporation of social rank can improve precision of detecting the leader by 14% in English, 8% in Arabic, and 4% in Chinese.