Emotion-Aware Speech Popularity Prediction: A Use-Case on TED Talks

Dimitrios Sgouropoulos, Petros Mitseas, Sofia Eleftheriou, Theodoros Giannakopoulos, Antonia Petrogianni, Lefteris Kapelonis, Nikolaos Antoniou, Athanasios Katsamanis, Shrikanth Narayanan

Abstract: In the context of the ever-growing influence of social media, understanding and predicting the popularity of content has become crucial for creators and marketers alike. Our research addresses this need by introducing a method to forecast the success of oral presentations, focusing on the nuanced use of paralinguistic features and insights derived from speech emotion recognition models. This innovative approach is designed to enhance verbal communication skills by providing public speakers with targeted feedback. We leverage a dataset of 2,462 TED talk videos, complete with metadata such as user comments, tags, and views, to establish a set of four objective metrics for determining presentation popularity. These metrics form the foundation of our analysis, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our predictive methodology. By integrating audio-based emotional cues with text-based content analysis we showcase the capability of the proposed speech analytics system to capture user assessments of presentation quality. This research highlights the role of emotional expression in speech as a component of content's appeal, advocating for a broader analytical perspective beyond just text-only analysis. It suggests new directions for improving the impact of public speaking and calls for further investigation into multimodal content analysis, aiming to deepen our understanding of audience engagement on social media and content delivery platforms.