Hugues Salamin’s research while affiliated with University of Glasgow and other places

Mobile phones pervade our everyday life like no other technology, but the effects they have on one-to-one conversations are still relatively unknown. This paper focuses on how mobile phones influence negotiations, i.e., on discussions where two parties try to reach an agreement starting from opposing preferences. The experiments involve 60 pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects). They must make a "yes" or "no" decision on whether several objects increase the chances of survival in a polar environment or not. When the participants disagree about a given object (one says "yes" and the other says "no"), they must try to convince one another and reach a common decision. Since the subjects discuss via phone, one of them (selected randomly) calls while the other is called. The results show that the caller convinces the receiver in 70 % of the cases ( value = 0.005 according to a two-tailed binomial test). Gender, age, personality and conflict handling style, measured during the experiment, fail in explaining such a persuasiveness difference. Calling or being called appears to be the most important factor behind the observed result.

Nonverbal behavior plays an important role in any human-human interaction. Teaching-an inherently social activity-is not an exception. So far, the effect of nonverbal behavioral cues accompanying lecture delivery was investigated in the case of traditional ex-cathedra lectures, where students and teachers are co-located. However, it is becoming increasingly more frequent to watch lectures online and, in this new type of setting, it is still unclear what the effect of nonverbal communication is. This article tries to address the problem and proposes experiments performed over the lectures of a popular web repository ("Videolectures"). The results show that automatically extracted nonverbal behavioral cues (prosody, voice quality and gesturing activity) predict the ratings that "Videolectures" users assign to the presentations.

This article presents experiments on automatic detection of laughter and fillers, two of the most important nonverbal behavioral cues observed in spoken conversations. The proposed approach is fully automatic and segments audio recordings captured with mobile phones into four types of interval: laughter, filler, speech and silence. The segmentation methods rely not only on probabilistic sequential models (in particular Hidden Markov Models), but also on Statistical Language Models aimed at estimating the a-priori probability of observing a given sequence of the four classes above. The experiments are speaker independent and performed over a total of 8 hours and 25 minutes of data (120 people in total). The results show that F1 scores up to 0.64 for laughter and 0.58 for fillers can be achieved.

The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech. It further introduces conflict in group discussions as a new task and deals with autism and its manifestations in speech. Finally, emotion is revisited as task, albeit with a broader range of overall twelve enacted emotional states. In this paper, we describe these four Sub-Challenges, their conditions, baselines, and a new feature set by the openSMILE toolkit, provided to the participants.

This article proposes experiments on the automatic recognition of personality traits and conflict handling style based on nonverbal communication. The tests are performed over the SSPNet-Nokia Corpus, a collection of 60 mobile phone calls (120 subjects in total) based on the Winter Survival Task. Nonverbal behavioral cues are extracted from speech (captured with the phone microphones) and motor activation (captured indirectly via the gyroscopes mounted on the phones). Support Vector Machines are then adopted to map the cues into two psychological constructs, namely the “Big Five” personality traits and the dimensions of the “Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory”, the former capturing individual characteristics and the latter accounting for subjects attitude towards conflict and disagreement. The results show that performances higher than chance to a statistically significant extent can be achieved for one personality trait (Neuroticism) and two conflict handling styles (Dominating and Obliging).

This article proposes experiments on decision making based on the "Winter Survival Task", one of the scenarios most commonly applied in behavioral and psychological studies. The goal of the Task is to identify, out of a predefined list of 12 items, those that are most likely to increase the chances of survival after the crash of a plane in a polar area. In our experiments, 60 pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects in total) negotiate a common choice of the items to be retained after that each subject has performed the task individually. The results of the negotiations are analyzed in causal terms and show that the choices made by the subjects individually act as a causal factor with respect to the outcome of the negotiation.

Conversational interaction is a dynamic activity in which participants engage in the construction of meaning and in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Lexical and prosodic accommodation have been observed in many studies as contributing importantly to these dimensions of social interaction. However, while previous works have considered accommodation mechanisms at global levels (for whole conversations, halves and thirds of conversations), this work investigates their evolution through repeated analysis at time intervals of increasing granularity to analyze the dynamics of alignment in a spoken language corpus. Results show that the levels of both prosodic and lexical accommodation fluctuate several times over the course of a conversation.