Detecting Emergent Leaders in Small Groups using Nonverbal Behavior

This paper presents first an analysis on how an emergent leader is perceived in newly formed small-groups, and in its second part tackles the emergent leader estimation task, using automatically extracted nonverbal cues. The estimations use rank-based and collective approaches with the combination of acoustic and visual features extracted from a new corpus specifically collected to analyse the emergent leadership phenomena. Our results show that visual information augments acoustic information, and the emergent leader is perceived by his/her peers as an active and dominant person. For the automatic inference of emergent leadership, adding relational information to the nonverbal cues improves the inference of each participant’s label in the group.