Title
Gaze and turn-taking behavior in casual conversational interactions
Abstract
Eye gaze is an important means for controlling interaction and coordinating the participants' turns smoothly. We have studied how eye gaze correlates with spoken interaction and especially focused on the combined effect of the speech signal and gazing to predict turn taking possibilities. It is well known that mutual gaze is important in the coordination of turn taking in two-party dialogs, and in this article, we investigate whether this fact also holds for three-party conversations. In group interactions, it may be that different features are used for managing turn taking than in two-party dialogs. We collected casual conversational data and used an eye tracker to systematically observe a participant's gaze in the interactions. By studying the combined effect of speech and gaze on turn taking, we aimed to answer our main questions: How well can eye gaze help in predicting turn taking? What is the role of eye gaze when the speaker holds the turn? Is the role of eye gaze as important in three-party dialogs as in two-party dialogue? We used Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to classify turn taking events with respect to speech and gaze features, so as to estimate how well the features signal a change of the speaker or a continuation of the same speaker. The results confirm the earlier hypothesis that eye gaze significantly helps in predicting the partner's turn taking activity, and we also get supporting evidence for our hypothesis that the speaker is a prominent coordinator of the interaction space. Such a turn taking model could be used in interactive applications to improve the system's conversational performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2499474.2499481
TIIS
Keywords
Field
DocType
group interaction,speech signal,eye tracker,important mean,casual conversational data,casual conversational interaction,two-party dialogue,interaction space,combined effect,turn-taking behavior,conversational performance,two-party dialog,wizard of oz experiment,conversational agent
Turn-taking,Computer science,Human–computer interaction,Eye tracking,Dialog management,Artificial intelligence,Dialog system,Distributed computing,Computer vision,Gaze,Support vector machine,Wizard of Oz experiment,Casual
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
3
2
20
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.04
25
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kristiina Jokinen127740.85
Hirohisa Furukawa2241.96
Masafumi Nishida314022.91
Seiichi Yamamoto441857.74