Automatic detection of group functional roles in face to face interactions

In this paper, we discuss a machine learning approach to automatically detect functional roles played by participants in a face to face interaction. We shortly introduce the coding scheme we used to classify the roles of the group members and the corpus we collected to assess the coding scheme reliability as well as to train statistical systems for automatic recognition of roles. We then discuss a machine learning approach based on multi-class SVM to automatically detect such roles by employing simple features of the visual and acoustical scene. The effectiveness of the classification is better than the chosen baselines and although the results are not yet good enough for a real application, they demonstrate the feasibility of the task of detecting group functional roles in face to face interactions. Copyright 2006 ACM.