Investigating the Sources of Linguistic Alignment in Conversation

Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 526–536, Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Investigating the Sources of Linguistic Alignment in Conversation Gabriel Doyle Department of Psychology Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 gdoyle@stanford.edu Michael C. Frank Department of Psychology Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 mcfrank@stanford.edu Abstract In conversation, speakers tend to “ac- commodate” or “align” to their partners, changing the style and substance of their communications to be more similar to their partners’ utterances. We focus here on “linguistic alignment,” changes in word choice based on others’ choices. Although linguistic alignment is observed across many different contexts and its degree cor- relates with important social factors such as power and likability, its sources are still uncertain. We build on a recent probabilis- tic model of alignment, using it to separate out alignment attributable to words ver- sus word categories. We model alignment in two contexts: telephone conversations and microblog replies. Our results show evidence of alignment, but it is primarily lexical rather than categorical. Further- more, we find that discourse acts modu- late alignment substantially. This evidence supports the view that alignment is shaped by strategic communicative processes re- lated to the ongoing discourse. 1 Introduction In conversation, people tend to adapt to one an- other across a broad range of behaviors. This adaptation behavior is collectively known as “communication accommodation” (Giles et al., 1991). Linguistic alignment, the use of sim- ilar words to a conversational partner, is one prominent form of accommodation. Alignment is found robustly across many settings, including in- person, computer-mediated, and web-based con- versation (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2012; Giles et al., 1979; Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002). In addition, the strength of alignment to conversational partners varies with relevant socio- logical factors, such as the power of the partners, their social network centrality, and their likability. Potentially, this alignment could be used to infer these factors in situations where they are difficult to observe directly. Although linguistic alignment appears to reflect important social dynamics, the mechanisms un- derlying alignment are still not well-understood. One particular question is whether alignment is supported by relatively automatic priming mecha- nisms, or higher-level, discourse and communica- tive strategies. The Interactive Alignment Model proposes that conversational partners prime each other, causing alignment via the primed reuse of structures ranging from individual lexical items to syntactic abstractions (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). In contrast, Accommodation Theory em- phasizes the relatively more communicative and strategic nature of alignment (Giles et al., 1991). Relative to this theoretical landscape, a number of questions have emerged. First, does alignment occur at structural levels? If alignment is driven by interactive priming of structures, effects of align- ment should be expected not only at the lexical level but also for structural elements or categories as well. In contrast, if alignment is primarily com- municative, then alignment strength might differ and be greater for specific words that serve par- ticular conversational or discourse functions in a particular situation. Second, does alignment …

Content truncated to 500 words