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 thi...

Page 12 meeting initiator. For instance, the meeting chair and secretary must be present; they have the highest participant importance. In a project meeting where specific tasks are discussed, task leaders would have a higher importance than normal project members and a lower importance than the meeting chair, the task speakers or the project reviewers. Meeting Significance. The meeting signifi...