Influential statements and gaze for persuasion modeling

Influential statements during conversations change the flow of the discussion and open new directions in the conversation. The content of the statement does not make the statement influential alone, it is strengthened by behavioral patterns, such as voice pitch, facial gestures, gaze and body postures. In this work we focus on the relationship between influential statements and gaze, as a potential cue in the automatic detection of conversation skills and in replicating natural interaction behavior for companionship and persuasive technologies. Within a multimodal data corpus of group conversations, we present an approach to analysis of the rich social signals and explore the potentials for correlation between the influential statements and gaze. The statements in the conversations were semi-automatically annotated and scored according to the level of influence, which provided us with boundaries for the gaze analysis. We present the first results of this approach.