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Conversation analysis at work: detection of conflict in competitive discussions through semi-automatic turn-organization analysis

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Abstract

This study proposes a semi-automatic approach aimed at detecting conflict in conversations. The approach is based on statistical techniques capable of identifying turn-organization regularities associated with conflict. The only manual step of the process is the segmentation of the conversations into turns (time intervals during which only one person talks) and overlapping speech segments (time intervals during which several persons talk at the same time). The rest of the process takes place automatically and the results show that conflictual exchanges can be detected with Precision and Recall around 70% (the experiments have been performed over 6 h of political debates). The approach brings two main benefits: the first is the possibility of analyzing potentially large amounts of conversational data with a limited effort, the second is that the model parameters provide indications on what turn-regularities are most likely to account for the presence of conflict.

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Notes

  1. A first-order ergodic Markov model captures stochastic processes described by a set of N states S t  ∈ {1, …,  N}, that occur following a transition probability P(S t |S t-1). It is formally defined as a couple λ =  < A, π > . A is the N × N time-invariant transition probability matrix. The initial state probability distribution π = {π i } represents the probability of the first state π i  = P(S 1 = i). The parameters of a Markov chain can be easily estimated by frequency counts directly from training state sequences.

  2. Using only one sequence to train a model, the initial probability parameter array is meaningless.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), under grant agreement no. 231287 (SSPNet).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Anna Pesarin, Marco Cristani & Vittorio Murino

  2. Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy

    Marco Cristani & Vittorio Murino

  3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

  4. Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

Authors
  1. Anna Pesarin
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  2. Marco Cristani
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  3. Vittorio Murino
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  4. Alessandro Vinciarelli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alessandro Vinciarelli.

Additional information

This article is part of the Supplement Issue on "Social Signals. From Theory to Applications," guest-edited by Isabella Poggi, Francesca D'Errico, and Alessandro Vinciarelli.

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Pesarin, A., Cristani, M., Murino, V. et al. Conversation analysis at work: detection of conflict in competitive discussions through semi-automatic turn-organization analysis. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 2), 533–540 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0417-9

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