title: 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 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.
authors.affiliation: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Shuyang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Greg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ver Steeg
authors.affiliation: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Aram
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Galstyan
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D015986:Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008962:Models, Theoretical