A generic framework for the inference of user states in human computer interaction

The analysis of affective or communicational states in human-human and human-computer interaction (HCI) using automatic machine analysis and learning approaches often suffers from the simplicity of the approaches or that very ambitious steps are often tried to be taken at once. In this paper, we propose a generic framework that overcomes many difficulties associated with real world user behavior analysis (i.e. uncertainty about the ground truth of the current state, subject independence, dynamic realtime analysis of multimodal information, and the processing of incomplete or erroneous inputs, e.g. after sensor failure or lack of input). We motivate the approach, that is based on the analysis and spotting of behavioral cues that are regarded as basic building blocks forming user state specific behavior, with the help of related work and the analysis of a large HCI corpus. For this corpus paralinguistic and nonverbal behavior could be significantly associated with user states. Some of our previous work on the detection and classification of behavioral cues is presented and a layered architecture based on hidden Markov models is introduced. We believe that this step by step approach towards the understanding of human behavior underlined by encouraging preliminary results outlines a principled approach towards the development and evaluation of computational mechanisms for the analysis of multimodal social signals.