Assessing the impact of language style on emergent leadership perception from ubiquitous audio

Leaders stand out for what they say and how they say it. This work describes the impact of the language style of emergent leaders in small group discussions based on 7 hours of audio from English spoken discussions recorded with a ubiquitous platform. For the language style analysis, word categories are extracted from manual transcriptions of the discussions as well as from automatically detected keywords. The most relevant word categories are then used to predict the emergent leader in each group. Our findings reveal that non-privacy sensitive word categories like amount of words, conjunctions and assent are good predictors of emergent leadership. The emergent leader can be correctly inferred in a fully automatic approach with up to 82% accuracy using categories derived from keywords, and up to 86% using categories derived from full manual transcriptions.