Virtual debate coach design: assessing multimodal argumentation performance

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of a coaching system used to train young politicians to apply appropriate multimodal rhetoric devices to improve their debate skills. The presented study is carried out to develop debate performance assessment methods and interaction models underlying a Virtual Debate Coach (VDC) application. We identify a number of criteria associated with three questions: (1) how convincing is a debater's argumentation; (2) how well are debate arguments structured; and (3) how well is an argument delivered. We collected and analysed multimodal data of trainees' debate behaviour, and contrasted it with that of skilled professional debaters. Observational, correlation and machine learning experiments were performed to identify multimodal correlates of convincing debate performance and link them to experts' assessments. A rich set of prosodic, motion, linguistic and structural features was considered for the system to operate on. The VDC system was positively evaluated in a trainee-based setting.