It’s not Just What You Do but also When You Do It: Novel Perspectives for Informing Interactive Public Speaking Training

February 2023
Learning and Innovating
Engineering and Numerical Tools
Communications avec actes dans un congrès international
Auteurs : Beatrice Biancardi (LINEACT), Yingjie Duan (LTCI), Mathieu Chollet (3School of Computing Science), Chloé Clavel (LTCI)
Conférence : International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications, 18 February 2023

Most of the emerging public speaking training systems, while very promising, leverage temporal-aggregate features, which do not take into account the structure of the speech. In this paper, we take a different perspective, testing whether some well-known socio-cognitive theories, like first impressions or primacy and recency effect, apply in the distinct context of public speaking perception. We investigated the impact of the temporal location of speech slices (i.e., at the beginning, middle or end) on the perception of confidence and persuasiveness of speakers giving online movie reviews (the Persuasive Opinion Multimedia dataset). Results show that, when considering multi-modality, usually the middle part of speech is the most informative. Additional findings also suggest the interest to leverage local interpretability (by computing SHAP values) to provide feedback directly, both at a specific time (what speech part?) and for a specific behaviour modality or feature (what behaviour?). This is a first step towards the design of more explainable and pedagogical interactive training systems. Such systems could be more efficient by focusing on improving the speaker’s most important behaviour during the most important moments of their performance, and by situating feedback at specific places within the total speech.