A gaze-based method for relating group involvement to individual engagement in multimodal multiparty dialogue

Abstract

This paper is concerned with modelling individual engagement and group involvement as well as their relationship in an eight-party, mutimodal corpus. We propose a number of features (presence, entropy, symmetry and maxgaze) that summarise different aspects of eye-gaze patterns and allow us to describe individual as well as group behaviour in time. We use these features to define similarities between the subjects and we compare this information with the engagement rankings the subjects expressed at the end of each interactions about themselves and the other participants. We analyse how these features relate to four classes of group involvement and we build a classifier that is able to distinguish between those classes with 71\% of accuracy.