Recovering participant identities in meetings from a probabilistic description of vocal interaction

An important decision in the design of automatic conversation understanding systems is the level at which information streams representing specific participants are merged. In the current work, we explore participant-dependence of low-level interactive aspects of conversation, namely the observed contextual preferences for talkspurt deployment. We argue that strong participant-dependence at this level gives cause for merging participant streams as early as possible. We demonstrate that our probabilistic description of talkspurt deployment preferences is strongly participant-dependent, and frequently predictive of participant identity.