Towards automatic estimation of conversation floors within F-formations

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

The detection of free-standing conversing groups has received significant attention in recent years. In the absence of a formal definition, most studies operationalize the notion of a conversation group either through a spatial or a temporal lens. Spatially, the most commonly used representation is the F-formation, defined by social scientists as the configuration in which people arrange themselves to sustain an interaction. However, the use of this representation is often accompanied with the simplifying assumption that a single conversation occurs within an F-formation. Temporally, various categories have been used to organize conversational units; these include, among others, turn, topic, and floor. Some of these concepts are hard to define objectively by themselves. The present work constitutes an initial exploration into unifying these perspectives by primarily posing the question: can we use the observation of simultaneous speaker turns to infer whether multiple conversation floors exist within an F-formation? We motivate a metric for the existence of distinct conversation floors based on simultaneous speaker turns, and provide an analysis using this metric to characterize conversations across F-formations of varying cardinality. We contribute two key findings: firstly, at the average speaking turn duration of about two seconds for humans, there is evidence for the existence of multiple floors within an F-formation; and secondly, an increase in the cardinality of an F-formation correlates with a decrease in duration of simultaneous speaking turns.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos, ACIIW 2019
PublisherIEEE
Pages175-181
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-7281-3891-6
ISBN (Print)978-1-7281-3892-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos, ACIIW 2019 - Cambridge, United Kingdom
Duration: 3 Sept 20196 Sept 2019

Publication series

Name2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos, ACIIW 2019

Conference

Conference8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos, ACIIW 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityCambridge
Period3/09/196/09/19

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • conversation floors
  • free-standing conversational groups
  • speaking turns

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