Analyzing Gaze Behavior and Dialogue Act during Turn-taking for Estimating Empathy Skill Level

We explored the gaze behavior towards the end of utterances and dialogue act (DA), i.e., verbal-behavior information indicating the intension of an utterance, during turn-keeping/changing to estimate empathy skill levels in multiparty discussions. This is the first attempt to explore the relationship between such a combination. First, we collected data on Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index (which measures empathy skill level), utterances that include the DA categories of Provision, Self-disclosure, Empathy, Turn-yielding, and Others, and gaze behavior from participants in four-person discussions. The results of analysis indicate that the gaze behavior accompanying utterances that include these DA categories during turn-keeping/changing differs in accordance with people's empathy skill levels. The most noteworthy result was that speakers with low empathy skill levels tend to avoid making eye contact with the listener when the DA category is Self-disclosure during turn-keeping. However, they tend to maintain eye contact when the DA category is Empathy. A listener who has a high empathy skill level often looks away from the speaker during turn-changing when the DA category of a speaker's utterance is Provision or Empathy. There was also no difference in gaze behavior between empathy skill levels when the DA category of the speaker's utterance was turn-yielding. From these findings, we constructed and evaluated models for estimating empathy skill level using gaze behavior and DA information. The evaluation results indicate that using both gaze behavior and DA during turn-keeping/changing is effective for estimating an individual's empathy skill level in multi-party discussions.