While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion.
In this paper, we combine existing NLP techniques with minimal supervision to build memory tips according to the keyword method, a well established mnemonic device for second language learning. We present what we believe to be the first extrinsic evaluation of a creative sentence generator on a vocabulary learning task. The results demonstrate that NLP techniques can effectively support the development of resources for second language learning.