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.
@article{arxiv.1704.02362,
title = {Fostering User Engagement: Rhetorical Devices for Applause Generation Learnt from TED Talks},
author = {Zhe Liu and Anbang Xu and Mengdi Zhang and Jalal Mahmud and Vibha Sinha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02362},
year = {2017}
}