Eye-gaze experiments for conversation monitoring

Eye-tracking technology has recently been matured so that its use in studies dealing with unobtrusive and natural user experiments has become easier to conduct. Simultaneously, human computer interactions have become more conversational in style, and more challenging in that they require various human conversational strategies, such as giving feedback and managing turn-taking. In this paper, we focus on eye-gaze in order to investigate turn taking signals and conversation monitoring in naturally occurring dialogues. We seek to build models that deal with the important aspects of which interlocutor the speaker is talking to, and what kind of turn taking signals the partners elicit, and we report the first results of our eye-tracking experiments.