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.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.52
Volume:
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:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
632–643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.52
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.52
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sravana Reddy, Mariya Lazarova, Yongze Yu, and Rosie Jones. 2021. Modeling Language Usage and Listener Engagement in Podcasts. In 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), pages 632–643, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Language Usage and Listener Engagement in Podcasts (Reddy et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.52.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.52.mp4