New publication accepted at WASSA

@inproceedings{Verma:et:al:2026,
  title     = {Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone
               Shapes Persuasive Strength},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
               Subjectivity, Sentiment, \& Social Media Analysis},
  year      = {2026},
  author    = {Verma, Bhuvanesh and Marreddy, Mounika and Mehler, Alexander},
  keywords  = {Argument Detection, Argument Quality Assessment,Topic Modelling, Persuasiveness, Convincingness, Emotion Analysis, Argument Mining},
  abstract  = {Emotional tone plays a central role in persuasion, yet its impact
               on computational assessments of political argument quality in
               real world election campaign speeches remains understudied. In
               this work, we investigate whether positive emotional framing correlates
               with higher perceived convincingness in political arguments. We
               fine-tune language models on argument quality datasets and test
               their ability to transfer convincingness predictions to real-world
               campaign speeches. Using a corpus of U.S. presidential campaign
               speeches, we analyze emotional polarity in relation to predicted
               persuasive strength to test whether positively framed arguments
               are judged more convincing than neutral or negative ones. Our
               empirical analysis shows that political parties rely heavily on
               argumentation during their election campaigns. Also, we found
               the evidence that politicians strategically employ emotional cues
               within their arguments during these campaign speeches, with positive
               emotions being more strongly associated with persuasive strength,
               for example in topics such as USMCA’s Effect on American Jobs
               and Agriculture, Border Control Policies, Progressive Tax Reforms.
               At the same time, we find that negative emotions have a weaker
               yet still non-negligible influence on voter persuasion in topics
               such as City Crime and Civil Unrest and White Supremacist Violence
               (Charlottesville Incident).},
  note      = {accepted}
}