Discrimination of Phase of Meeting from Utterance Pattern in Group Meeting

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the relationship between phases of meeting and non-verbal speech information. We considered that conversations at the meeting must show information to phases of the meeting as non-verbal features. We attempted to discriminate between the divergence phase and the convergence phase by the decision tree method using only non-verbal speech information. We performed an experiment with a group task based on a modification of the game Twenty-Questions and recorded participants' speech data. In a discrimination test, we used the recorded speech, and defined non-verbal speech features such as switching pauses (i.e. silent intervals between the utterance of two speakers), frequency for each turn-taking pattern and duration. We conducted the two discrimination tests for using parameters with friends group, with strangers group and with both groups. From the results, the accuracy of the open test is 77.3%, 85.2% and 77.3%, respectively. Taking into account only non-verbal speech information was used, we consider these results to be fairly good.