Understanding Confounding Effects in Linguistic Coordination: An Information Theoretic Approach
Abstract
We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We revisit some of the previous studies that reported strong signatures of stylistic accommodation, and find that a significant part of the observed coordination can be attributed to a simple confounding effectlength coordination. Specifically, longer utterances tend to be followed by longer responses, which gives rise to spurious correlations in the other stylistic features. We propose a test to distinguish correlations in length due to contextual factors (topic of conversation, user verbosity, etc.) and turn-by-turn coordination. We also suggest a test to identify whether stylistic coordination persists even after accounting for length coordination and contextual factors.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 26, 2015
- Accession Number
- AD1011051
Entities
People
- Aram Galstyan
- Greg Ver Steeg
- Shuyang Gao
Organizations
- University of Southern California