Multi-task learning of social psychology assessments and nonverbal features for automatic leadership identification

In social psychology, the leadership investigation is performed using questionnaires which are either i) self-administered or ii) applied to group participants to evaluate other members or iii) filled by external observers. While each of these sources is informative, using them individually might not be as effective as using them jointly. This paper is the first attempt which addresses the automatic identification of leaders in small-group meetings, by learning effective models using nonverbal audio-visual features and the results of social psychology questionnaires that reflect assessments regarding leadership. Learning is based on Multi-Task Learning which is performed without using ground-truth data (GT), but using the results of questionnaires (having substantial agreement with GT), administered to external observers and the participants of the meetings, as tasks. The results show that joint learning results in better performance as compared to single task learning and other baselines.