Building a Database of Political Speech: Does Culture Matter in Charisma Annotations?

For both individual politicians and political parties the internet has become a vital tool for self-promotion and the distribution of ideas. The rise of streaming has enabled political debates and speeches to reach global audiences. In this paper, we explore the nature of charisma in political speech, with a view to automatic detection. To this end, we have collected a new database of political speech from YouTube and other on-line resources. Annotation is performed both by native listeners, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers. Detailed analysis shows that both label sets are equally reliable. The results support the use of crowd-sourced labels for speaker traits such as charisma in political speech, even where cultural subtleties are present. The impact of these different annotations on charisma prediction from political speech is also investigated.