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Inferring competitive role patterns in reality TV show through nonverbal analysis

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new facet of social media, namely that depicting social interaction. More concretely, we address this problem from the perspective of nonverbal behavior-based analysis of competitive meetings. For our study, we made use of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, which features a competition for a real, highly paid corporate job. Our analysis is centered around two tasks regarding a person’s role in a meeting: predicting the person with the highest status, and predicting the fired candidates. We address this problem by adopting both supervised and unsupervised strategies. The current study was carried out using nonverbal audio cues. Our approach is based only on the nonverbal interaction dynamics during the meeting without relying on the spoken words. The analysis is based on two types of data: individual and relational measures. Results obtained from the analysis of a full season of the show are promising (up to 85.7% of accuracy in the first case and up to 92.8% in the second case). Our approach has been conveniently compared with the Influence Model, demonstrating its superiority.

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Notes

  1. This has been decided by the authors. It was set up between 80% and 95% from the length of an episode, depending on the case.

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Acknowledgements

This work was done while B. Raducanu visited IDIAP as an AMIDA project trainee. D. Gatica-Perez thanks the support of the AMIDA and IM2 projects. B. Raducanu is also supported by MEC Grants TIN2009-14404-C02-01 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO CSD 2007-00018, Spain. We thank Dinesh Jayagopi (IDIAP) for providing the code for Influence Model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Vision Center, Edifici “O”—Campus UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Bogdan Raducanu

  2. IDIAP Research Institute, Rue Marconi 19, 1920, Martigny, Switzerland

    Daniel Gatica-Perez

  3. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Lausanne, Switzeland

    Daniel Gatica-Perez

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  1. Bogdan Raducanu
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  2. Daniel Gatica-Perez
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Correspondence to Bogdan Raducanu.

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Raducanu, B., Gatica-Perez, D. Inferring competitive role patterns in reality TV show through nonverbal analysis. Multimed Tools Appl 56, 207–226 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0545-8

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