Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication
This work addresses a gap in computational linguistics for researchers and practitioners interested in persuasive communication, though it is incremental as it extends existing work on linguistic features.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding the persuasive effect of phonetic features like euphony in language, which had received little computational attention, by analyzing four datasets and finding that phonetic devices positively impact persuasion.
While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion.