  The detection of free-standing conversing groups has received significant
attention in recent years. In the absence of a formal definition, most studies
operationalize the notion of a conversation group either through a spatial or a
temporal lens. Spatially, the most commonly used representation is the
F-formation, defined by social scientists as the configuration in which people
arrange themselves to sustain an interaction. However, the use of this
representation is often accompanied with the simplifying assumption that a
single conversation occurs within an F-formation. Temporally, various
categories have been used to organize conversational units; these include,
among others, turn, topic, and floor. Some of these concepts are hard to define
objectively by themselves. The present work constitutes an initial exploration
into unifying these perspectives by primarily posing the question: can we use
the observation of simultaneous speaker turns to infer whether multiple
conversation floors exist within an F-formation? We motivate a metric for the
existence of distinct conversation floors based on simultaneous speaker turns,
and provide an analysis using this metric to characterize conversations across
F-formations of varying cardinality. We contribute two key findings: firstly,
at the average speaking turn duration of about two seconds for humans, there is
evidence for the existence of multiple floors within an F-formation; and
secondly, an increase in the cardinality of an F-formation correlates with a
decrease in duration of simultaneous speaking turns.
