Analysis of speech transcripts to predict winners of U.S. Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates

In this paper, we describe investigations into the speech used in American Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. We explore possible transcript-based features that may correlate with personally appealing or politically persuasive language. We identify, with chi-squared analysis, features that correlate with success in the debates. We find that with a set of surface-level features from historical debates, we can predict the winners of presidential debates with success moderately above chance.