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Analyzing mouth-opening transition pattern for predicting next speaker in multi-party meetings

Techniques that use nonverbal behaviors to predict turn-changing situations—e.g., predicting who will speak next and when, in multi-party meetings—have been receiving a lot of attention in recent research. In this research, we explored the transition pattern of the degree of mouth opening (MOTP) towards the end of an utterance to predict the next speaker in multiparty meetings. First, we collected data on utterances and on the degree of mouth opening (closed, slightly open, and wide open) from participants in four-person meetings. The representative results of the analysis of the MOTPs showed that the speaker often continues to open the mouth slightly in turn-keeping and starts to close the mouth from opening it slightly or continues to open the mouth largely in turn-changing. The next speaker often starts to open the mouth slightly from closing it in turn-changing. On the basis of these findings, we constructed next-speaker prediction models using the MOTPs. In addition, as a multimodal fusion, we constructed models using the MOTPs and gaze information, which is known to be one of the most useful types of information for the next-speaker prediction. The evaluation of the models suggests that the speaker's and listeners' MOTPs are effective for predicting the next speaker in multi-party meetings. It also suggests the multimodal fusion using the MOTP and gaze information is more useful for the prediction than using one or the other.