Implicit Proposal Filtering in Multi-Party Consensus-Building Conversations

An attempt was made to statistically estimate proposals which survived the discussion to be incorporated in the final agreement in an instance of a Japanese design conversation. Low level speech and vision features of hearer behaviors corresponding to aiduti, noddings and gaze were found to be a positive predictor of survival. The result suggests that non-linguistic hearer responses work as implicit proposal filters in consensus building, and could provide promising candidate features for the purpose of recognition and summarization of meeting events.