Abstract
Persuasive communication is an essential component of our daily lives, whether it is negotiating, reviewing a product, or campaigning for the acceptance of a point of view. With the rapid expansion of social media websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and ExpoTV, it is becoming ever more important and useful to understand persuasiveness in social multimedia content. In this paper we present a novel analysis of verbal behavior, based on lexical usage and paraverbal markers of hesitation, in the context of predicting persuasiveness in online multimedia content. Toward the end goal of predicting perceived persuasion, this work also explores the potential differences in verbal behavior of people expressing a positive opinion (e.g., a positive movie review) versus a negative one. The analysis is performed on a multimedia corpus of 1,000 movie review videos annotated for persuasiveness. Our results show that verbal behavior can be a significant predictor of persuasiveness in such online multimedia content.
Highlights
A message that is “intended to shape, reinforce or change the responses of another or others” is categorized as persuasive communication (Miller, 1980), and it is important for the role it plays in creating social influence and altering other people’s opinions (Reardon, 1991; Zimbardo and Leippe, 1991)
Since multiple prior works point to the usefulness of the text modality in persuasive communication and to the power of text classification with lexical features in various tasks, we explored the feasibility of capturing the difference in verbal behavior between persuasive and unpersuasive expressions of opinions in online social multimedia content
Hypothesis 1: The lexical features are predictive of persuasiveness. This is manifested by the fact that they perform significantly better than a majority baseline, which is only 51.04% accurate on the combined set of positive and negative reviews, while the lexical features achieved an accuracy of around 77% (Figure 1)
Summary
A message that is “intended to shape, reinforce or change the responses of another or others” is categorized as persuasive communication (Miller, 1980), and it is important for the role it plays in creating social influence and altering other people’s opinions (Reardon, 1991; Zimbardo and Leippe, 1991). The growth of social networking sites on the Internet has resulted in an explosion of online content with the purpose of delivering persuasive messages. Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and ExpoTV are examples of online media in which these messages propagate mainly in the form of videos. ExpoTV, in particular, is a repository of a large number of videos dedicated for product reviews in which people try to convince others in favor of or against the use of various products This raises an interesting research problem as to what it is that makes certain speakers have a substantial impact on others’ opinions while other speakers are ignored
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