Role Recognition in Multiparty Recordings using Social Affiliation Networks and Discrete Distributions

This paper presents an approach for the recognition of roles in multiparty recordings. The approach includes two major stages: extraction of Social Affiliation Networks (speaker diarization and representation of people in terms of their social interactions), and role recognition (application of discrete probability distributions to map people into roles). The experiments are performed over several corpora, including broadcast data and meeting recordings, for a total of roughly 90 hours of material. The results are satisfactory for the broadcast data (around 80 percent of the data time correctly labeled in terms of role), while they still must be improved in the case of the meeting recordings (around 45 percent of the data time correctly labeled). In both cases, the approach outperforms significantly chance.