Modeling Language Usage and Listener Engagement in Podcasts
Sravana Reddy, Mariya Lazarova, Yongze Yu, Rosie Jones
Abstract
While there is an abundance of advice to podcast creators on how to speak in ways that engage their listeners, there has been little data-driven analysis of podcasts that relates linguistic style with engagement. In this paper, we investigate how various factors – vocabulary diversity, distinctiveness, emotion, and syntax, among others – correlate with engagement, based on analysis of the creators’ written descriptions and transcripts of the audio. We build models with different textual representations, and show that the identified features are highly predictive of engagement. Our analysis tests popular wisdom about stylistic elements in high-engagement podcasts, corroborating some pieces of advice and adding new perspectives on others.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{reddy-etal-2021-modeling,
title = "Modeling Language Usage and Listener Engagement in Podcasts",
author = "Reddy, Sravana and
Lazarova, Mariya and
Yu, Yongze and
Jones, Rosie",
editor = "Zong, Chengqing and
Xia, Fei and
Li, Wenjie and
Navigli, Roberto",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.52/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.52",
pages = "632--643"
}