Analysis of Linguistic Style Accommodation in Online Debates

Proceedings of COLING 2012: Technical Papers, pages 1831–1846, COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012. Analysis of Linguistic Style Accommodation in Online Debates Arjun Mukherjee Bing Liu Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Chicago arjun4787@gmail.com liub@cs.uic.edu ABSTRACT Psycholinguistic phenomenon of communication accommodation (Giles et al., 1991) is probably one of the most important contributions in the interdisciplinary field of linguistics, psychology, information, and communication theory. Existing works have applied this theory to various domains like gesture, linguistics, backchannels, and even social media like tweets. In this work, we analyze the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic style accommodation in online debates. First, we present a Joint Topic Expression (JTE) model for modeling debate posts and use it to generate our unique dataset for studying accommodation in debates. Specifically, we analyze the phenomenon across agreeing/disagreeing debating pairs generated using our JTE model. Second, we propose a formal framework for analyzing the linguistic phenomena of accommodation in online debates. Experiments on a large collection of real-life debate posts reveal very interesting insights about the complex phenomenon of psycholinguistic accommodation in online debates. KEYWORDS : Linguistic style accommodation, linguistic convergence, accommodation in debates, online debate conversations. 1831 1 Introduction The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation was developed by Howard Giles (Giles et al., 1991). It argues that “when people interact, they adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures, to accommodate to others”. This adjustment or accommodation tends to occur unconsciously, i.e., people tend to instinctively converge to one another’s communicative behavior. Over the past five decades, this phenomenon has received a great deal of attention across a myriad of domains: posture (Condon and Ogston, 1967), speech pause length (Jaffe and Feldstein, 1970), head nodding (Hale and Burgoon, 1984), generic linguistic style (Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002), tweets (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2011), etc. This work presents a formal framework to model communication accommodation in online debates. Online debate forums are perhaps the most popular form of debates where people participate in discussions of various issues like politics, religions, society, human rights, etc. It is naturally very interesting to analyze the phenomenon of accommodation in debates. In this work, we focus on linguistic style accommodation in debates. In detail, we will perform the following types of analysis: stylistic cohesion, stylistic accommodation, influence, and accommodation across both agreeing and disagreeing debate posts in online debates. We use the linguistic style markers in LIWC (Pennebaker et al., 2007) to measure the amount of linguistic accommodation exhibited. The underlying hypothesis behind the “measurement” of linguistic accommodation using linguistic style markers is based on the prior works in (Gonzales et al., 2010; Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002; Taylor and Thomas, 2008), which have shown that linguistic accommodation being most pronounced in style dimensions is a good metric for measurement. Linguistic “style” here denotes content independent language constructs, i.e., how things are said as opposed what is said. Linguistic style has also been shown (Levelt and Kelter, 1982) to be exhibited somewhat unconsciously and hence it is an interesting target for analysis, …

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