Toward a Supporting System of Communication Skill: The Influence of Functional Roles of Participants in Group Discussion

More and more companies are putting emphasis on communication skill in the recruitment of their employees and are adopting group discussion as part of recruitment interview. In our project, we aim to develop a system that can provide advices to its users in improving the impression of their communication skill during group discussion. In this paper, we focus on the functional roles of the participants in group discussion and report the results of the analysis of the relationship between communication skill impression and functional roles. This work is based on a group discussion corpus of 40 participants. The participants’ communication skill of the corpus was evaluated by 21 external experts who had experience of recruitment. In addition, seven functional roles: Follower, Gatekeeper, Information giver, Objector, Opinion provider, Passive participant, and Summarizer were defined and annotated. Furthermore, we analyzed the conversational situations of corpus and the difference of between participants with high-score and low-score communication skill in these situations.