Verbal Behaviors and Persuasiveness in Online Multimedia Content

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.