Acoustic and para-verbal indicators of persuasiveness in social multimedia

Persuasive communication and interaction play an important and pervasive role in many aspects of our lives. With the rapid growth of social multimedia websites such as YouTube, it has become more important and useful to understand persuasiveness in the context of online social multimedia content. In this paper, we present our results of conducting various analyses of persuasiveness in speech with our multimedia corpus of 1,000 movie review videos obtained from ExpoTV.com, a popular social multimedia website. Our experiments firstly show that a speaker´s level of persuasiveness can be predicted from acoustic characteristics and para-verbal cues related to speech fluency. Secondly, we show that taking acoustic cues in different time periods of a movie review can improve the performance of predicting a speaker´s level of persuasiveness. Lastly, we show that a speaker´s positive or negative attitude toward a topic influences the prediction performance as well.