Linking Speaking and Looking Behavior Patterns with Group Composition, Perception, and Performance

This paper addresses the task of mining typical behavioral patterns from small group face-to-face interactions and linking them to social-psychological group variables. Towards this goal, we define group speaking and looking cues by aggregating automatically extracted cues at the individual and dyadic levels. Then, we define a bag of nonverbal patterns (Bag-of-NVPs) to discretize the group cues. The topics learnt using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model are then interpreted by studying the correlations with group variables such as group composition, group interpersonal perception, and group performance. Our results show that both group behavior cues and topics have significant correlations with (and predictive information for) all the above variables. For our study, we use interactions with unacquainted members i.e. newly formed groups.