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arXiv · 2111.07130

Prediction of Listener Perception of Argumentative Speech in a Crowdsourced Dataset Using (Psycho-)Linguistic and Fluency Features

Yu Qiao·Sourabh Zanwar·Rishab Bhattacharyya·Daniel Wiechmann·Wei Zhou·Elma Kerz·Ralf Schlüter
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Abstract

One of the key communicative competencies is the ability to maintain fluency in monologic speech and the ability to produce sophisticated language to argue a position convincingly. In this paper we aim to predict TED talk-style affective ratings in a crowdsourced dataset of argumentative speech consisting of 7 hours of speech from 110 individuals. The speech samples were elicited through task prompts relating to three debating topics. The samples received a total of 2211 ratings from 737 human raters pertaining to 14 affective categories. We present an effective approach to the classification task of predicting these categories through fine-tuning a model pre-trained on a large dataset of TED talks public speeches. We use a combination of fluency features derived from a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition system and a large set of human-interpretable linguistic features obtained from an automatic text analysis system. Classification accuracy was greater than 60% for all 14 rating categories, with a peak performance of 72% for the rating category 'informative'. In a secondary experiment, we determined the relative importance of features from different groups using SP-LIME.

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Yu Qiao, Sourabh Zanwar, Rishab Bhattacharyya, Daniel Wiechmann, Wei Zhou, Elma Kerz, Ralf Schlüter. 2021-11-13. Prediction of Listener Perception of Argumentative Speech in a Crowdsourced Dataset Using (Psycho-)Linguistic and Fluency Features. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07130

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