Fernando Vega-Redondo


2020

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Helpful or Hierarchical? Predicting the Communicative Strategies of Chat Participants, and their Impact on Success
Farzana Rashid | Tommaso Fornaciari | Dirk Hovy | Eduardo Blanco | Fernando Vega-Redondo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

When interacting with each other, we motivate, advise, inform, show love or power towards our peers. However, the way we interact may also hold some indication on how successful we are, as people often try to help each other to achieve their goals. We study the chat interactions of thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs who discuss and develop business models. We manually annotate a set of about 5,500 chat interactions with four dimensions of interaction styles (motivation, cooperation, equality, advice). We find that these styles can be reliably predicted, and that the communication styles can be used to predict a number of indices of business success. Our findings indicate that successful communicators are also successful in other domains.