An Evaluation and Comparison of Linguistic Alignment Measures

Linguistic alignment has emerged as an important property of conversational language and a driver of mutual understanding in dialogue. While various computational measures of linguistic alignment in corpus and experimental data have been devised, a systematic evaluation of them is missing. In this study, we first evaluate the sensitivity and distributional properties of three measures, indiscriminate local linguistic alignment (LLA), Spearman’s correlation coefficient (SCC), and repetition decay (RepDecay). Then we apply them in a study of interactive alignment and individual differences to see how well they conform to the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM), and how well they can reveal the individual differences in alignment propensity. Our results suggest that LLA has the overall best performance.

[1]  Augusto Gnisci,et al.  Sequential strategies of accommodation: a new method in courtroom. , 2005, The British journal of social psychology.

[2]  S. Garrod,et al.  Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination , 1987, Cognition.

[3]  Charles E. Brown.  Coefficient of Variation , 1998 .

[4]  Ann Bies,et al.  The Penn Treebank: Annotating Predicate Argument Structure , 1994, HLT.

[5]  Adam N. Joinson,et al.  Finding Zelig in Text: A Measure for Normalising Linguistic Accommodation , 2014, COLING.

[6]  Wh Round,et al.  Coefficient of Variation and the EEG , 2002 .

[7]  Marko Dragojevic,et al.  Communication Accommodation Theory , 2015 .

[8]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Computational Modelling of Structural Priming in Dialogue , 2006, NAACL.

[9]  Cindy Gallois,et al.  Strategies of Accommodation: , 1999 .

[10]  W. Stiles,et al.  Coming to Terms , 2004 .

[11]  Jerome L. Myers,et al.  Research Design and Statistical Analysis , 1991 .

[12]  Kenneth Ward Church.  Empirical Estimates of Adaptation: The chance of Two Noriegas is closer to p/2 than p2 , 2000, COLING.

[13]  J. Pittam,et al.  Accent Accommodation in the Job Interview , 1997 .

[14]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses , 2006, LREC.

[15]  Craig H. Martell,et al.  Lexical and Discourse Analysis of Online Chat Dialog , 2007, International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007).

[16]  Jeremy H. Clear,et al.  The British national corpus , 1993 .

[17]  S. Shapiro,et al.  An Analysis of Variance Test for Normality (Complete Samples) , 1965 .

[18]  Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil,et al.  Chameleons in Imagined Conversations: A New Approach to Understanding Coordination of Linguistic Style in Dialogs , 2011, CMCL@ACL.

[19]  Frank Keller,et al.  Parallelism in Coordination as an Instance of Syntactic Priming: Evidence from Corpus-based Modeling , 2005, HLT.

[20]  M. Pickering,et al.  Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[21]  M. Pickering,et al.  Syntactic priming in language production , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[22]  C. Frith,et al.  Coming to Terms , 2012, Psychological science.

[23]  Francisco Iacobelli,et al.  Computational Measures for Language Similarity Across Time in Online Communities , 2006, HLT-NAACL 2006.

[24]  Yafei Wang,et al.  Linguistic Adaptation in Conversation Threads: Analyzing Alignment in Online Health Communities , 2014 .

[25]  S. Gries.  Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-based Approach , 2005, Journal of psycholinguistic research.