Discussion Flows: An Interactive Visualization for Analyzing Engagement in Multi-Party Meetings

Abstract

Engagement in multi-party meetings is a key indicator of outcome. Poor attendee involvement can hinder progress and hurt team cohesion. Thus, there is a strong motivation for organizations to better understand what happens in meetings and improve upon their experience. However, analyzing multi-party meetings is a challenging task, as one needs to consider both verbal exchanges and meeting dynamics among speakers. There is currently a lack of support on these unique tasks. In this paper, we present a new visual approach to help analyze multi-party meetings in industry settings: Discussion Flows, a multi-level interactive visualization tool. Its glyph-based overview allows effortless comparison of overall interactions among different meetings, whereas the individual meeting view uses flow diagrams to convey the relative participation of different speakers throughout the meeting agenda in different levels of details. We demonstrate our approach with meeting recordings from an open source dialogue corpora and use them as the benchmark dataset.