Computational Analysis of Persuasiveness in Social Multimedia

Our lives are heavily influenced by persuasive communication, and it is essential in almost any types of social interactions from business negotiation to conversation with our friends and family. With the rapid growth of social multimedia websites, it is becoming ever more important and useful to understand persuasiveness in the context of social multimedia content online. In this paper, we introduce our newly created multimedia corpus of 1,000 movie review videos obtained from a social multimedia website called ExpoTV.com, which will be made freely available to the research community. Our research results presented here revolve around the following 3 main research hypotheses. Firstly, we show that computational descriptors derived from verbal and nonverbal behavior can be predictive of persuasiveness. We further show that combining descriptors from multiple communication modalities (audio, text and visual) improve the prediction performance compared to using those from single modality alone. Secondly, we investigate if having prior knowledge of a speaker expressing a positive or negative opinion helps better predict the speaker's persuasiveness. Lastly, we show that it is possible to make comparable prediction of persuasiveness by only looking at thin slices (shorter time windows) of a speaker's behavior.