Related papers: Fostering User Engagement: Rhetorical Devices for …
Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains…
Data visualization practitioners routinely invoke inspiration, yet we know little about how it is constructed in public conversations. We conduct a discourse analysis of 31 episodes from five popular data visualization podcasts. Podcasts…
Argumentation generation has attracted substantial research interest due to its central role in human reasoning and decision-making. However, most existing argumentative corpora focus on non-interactive, single-turn settings, either…
Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development of models which treat conversation as a sequence-to-sequence…
Why do some speakers capture a room almost instantly while others fail to connect? The real-time architecture of audience engagement remains largely a black box. Here, we used motion-captured animations to present the pure nonverbal…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong conversational abilities. In this Working Paper, we study them in the context of debating in two ways: their ability to perform in a structured debate along with a dataset of arguments to use…
The modulation of voice properties, such as pitch, volume, and speed, is crucial for delivering a successful public speech. However, it is challenging to master different voice modulation skills. Though many guidelines are available, they…
This paper introduces GestureCoach, a system designed to help speakers deliver more engaging talks by guiding them to gesture effectively during rehearsal. GestureCoach combines an LLM-driven gesture recommendation model with a rehearsal…
Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. To investigate the process of providing natural language explanations, we leverage the dynamics of the /r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a…
Explanations are pervasive in our lives. Mostly, they occur in dialogical form where an {\em explainer} discusses a concept or phenomenon of interest with an {\em explainee}. Leaving the explainee with a clear understanding is not…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
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…
Developing intelligent persuasive conversational agents to change people's opinions and actions for social good is the frontier in advancing the ethical development of automated dialogue systems. To do so, the first step is to understand…
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has been attracting attention by methods for modeling multi-turn contexts. The multi-turn input to a pretraining model implicitly assumes that the current turn and other turns are distinguished…
Today's lectures are often talks following a straight line of slides. In many lectures the process of content teaching is not as efficient as it could be. Technologies, such as smart-phones and wireless communication, enable a new level of…
Background: Public speaking is a vital professional skill, yet it remains a source of significant anxiety for many individuals. Traditional training relies heavily on expert coaching, but recent advances in AI has led to novel types of…
Detecting persuasion in argumentative text is a challenging task with important implications for understanding human communication. This work investigates the role of persuasion strategies - such as Attack on reputation, Distraction, and…
Conversational agents are gaining popularity with the increasing ubiquity of smart devices. However, training agents in a data driven manner is challenging due to a lack of suitable corpora. This paper presents a novel method for gathering…
Public speaking anxiety affects many individuals, yet opportunities for real-world practice remain limited. This study explores how augmented reality (AR) can provide an accessible training environment for public speaking. Drawing from…
The ability to monitor audience reactions is critical when delivering presentations. However, current videoconferencing platforms offer limited solutions to support this. This work leverages recent advances in affect sensing to capture and…