Modelling Participant Affect in Meetings with Turn-Taking Features

This paper explores the relationship between turn-taking and meeting affect. To investigate this, we model post-meeting ratings of satisfaction, cohesion and leadership from participants of AMI corpus meetings using group and individual turn-taking features. The results indicate that participants gave higher satisfaction and cohesiveness ratings to meetings with greater group turn-taking freedom and individual very short utterance rates, while lower ratings were associated with more silence and speaker overlap. Besides broad applicability to satisfaction ratings, turn-taking freedom was found to be a better predictor than equality of speaking time when considering whether participants felt that everyone they had a chance to contribute. If we include dialogue act information, we see that substantive feedback type turns like assessments are more predictive of meeting affect than information giving acts or backchannels. This work highlights the importance of feedback turns and modelling group level activity in multiparty dialogue for understanding the social aspects of speech.