Estimating Interpersonal Reactivity Scores Using Gaze Behavior and Dialogue Act During Turn-Changing

Abstract

We explored the effectiveness of external observable behaviors in multi-party discussions to estimate an individual’s empathy skill level. In our previous research, we estimated personal empathy skills from the external observable behavior in multi-person dialogues. We demonstrated that the gaze behavior towards the end of utterances and dialogue act (DA), i.e., verbal-behavior information indicating the intension of an utterance during turn-keeping/changing, are important for estimating empathy level. We focused on Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), which measures empathy skill level and consists of four dimensions of empathy, i.e., empathic concern (EC), perspective taking (PT), personal distress (PD), and fantasy (FS), as the estimation target. We particularly focused on estimating an individual’s EC score. In this research, we explored whether gaze behavior and DA during turn-keeping/changing are useful regarding the other three dimensions, i.e., PT, PD, and FS by constructing and evaluating estimation models based on these dimensions. We found that gaze behavior and DA are useful for estimating the scores of these three dimensions. Therefore, gaze behavior and DA during turn-changing/keeping are useful for estimating the scores of all four Davis’ IRI dimensions.