A Robust Diarization System for Measuring Dominance in Peer-Led Team Learning Groups

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust speaker diarization system tailored for peer-led STEM learning groups, utilizing informed HMMs and a novel dominance scoring method based on acoustic analysis.

Contribution

It develops an informed HMM-based diarization approach that incorporates side information and a new dominance score for analyzing group dynamics.

Findings

Effective diarization with side information improves accuracy.

The dominance score correlates with leadership roles.

System enables analysis of peer interactions in STEM education.

Abstract

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a structured learning model where a team leader is appointed to facilitate collaborative problem solving among students for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. This paper presents an informed HMM-based speaker diarization system. The minimum duration of short conversationalturns and number of participating students were fed as side information to the HMM system. A modified form of Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) was used for iterative merging and re-segmentation. Finally, we used the diarization output to compute a novel dominance score based on unsupervised acoustic analysis.