The following paper has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis (WASSA):
Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone Shapes Persuasive Strength
2026.
Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone
Shapes Persuasive Strength. Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis.
accepted.
BibTeX
@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, satek},
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}
}