  One problem that every presenter faces when delivering a public discourse is
how to hold the listeners' attentions or to keep them involved. Therefore, many
studies in conversation analysis work on this issue and suggest qualitatively
con-structions that can effectively lead to audience's applause. To investigate
these proposals quantitatively, in this study we an-alyze the transcripts of
2,135 TED Talks, with a particular fo-cus on the rhetorical devices that are
used by the presenters for applause elicitation. Through conducting regression
anal-ysis, we identify and interpret 24 rhetorical devices as triggers of
audience applauding. We further build models that can rec-ognize
applause-evoking sentences and conclude this work with potential implications.
