Understanding Confounding Effects in Linguistic Coordination: An Information-Theoretic Approach.

Autor: Shuyang Gao, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 10, Iss 6, p e0130167 (2015)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130167
Popis: 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 effect--length 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.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals