Fostering User Engagement: Rhetorical Devices for Applause Generation Learnt from TED Talks
This work addresses the problem of enhancing audience engagement for presenters, though it is incremental as it builds on prior qualitative research.
The study analyzed 2,135 TED Talk transcripts to quantitatively identify rhetorical devices that trigger audience applause, finding 24 such devices through regression analysis and building models to recognize applause-evoking sentences.
One problem that every presenter faces when delivering a public discourse is how to hold the listeners' attentions or to keep them involved. Therefore, many studies in conversation analysis work on this issue and suggest qualitatively con-structions that can effectively lead to audience's applause. To investigate these proposals quantitatively, in this study we an-alyze the transcripts of 2,135 TED Talks, with a particular fo-cus on the rhetorical devices that are used by the presenters for applause elicitation. Through conducting regression anal-ysis, we identify and interpret 24 rhetorical devices as triggers of audience applauding. We further build models that can rec-ognize applause-evoking sentences and conclude this work with potential implications.