# Analyzing Verbal and Nonverbal Features for Predicting Group Performance

## TL;DR

This study evaluates verbal and nonverbal cues from group conversations to predict group performance, introducing a new dataset and demonstrating the high predictive power of nonverbal speech features, with verbal features also being significant.

## Contribution

It introduces a new publicly available survival task dataset, merges it with existing data for larger scale analysis, and compares verbal and nonverbal features for performance prediction.

## Key findings

- Nonverbal speech features are highly effective for prediction.
- Verbal features are the most important individual predictors.
- Combining features improves prediction accuracy.

## Abstract

This work analyzes the efficacy of verbal and nonverbal features of group conversation for the task of automatic prediction of group task performance. We describe a new publicly available survival task dataset that was collected and annotated to facilitate this prediction task. In these experiments, the new dataset is merged with an existing survival task dataset, allowing us to compare feature sets on a much larger amount of data than has been used in recent related work. This work is also distinct from related research on social signal processing (SSP) in that we compare verbal and nonverbal features, whereas SSP is almost exclusively concerned with nonverbal aspects of social interaction. A key finding is that nonverbal features from the speech signal are extremely effective for this task, even on their own. However, the most effective individual features are verbal features, and we highlight the most important ones.