Understanding confounding effects in linguistic coordination: an information-theoretic approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces an information-theoretic method to measure stylistic coordination in dialogues, accounting for confounding factors like utterance length, and provides tests to distinguish genuine stylistic effects from spurious correlations.

Contribution

It presents a novel information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination that accounts for confounding factors such as utterance length and contextual influences.

Findings

Length coordination explains much of the observed stylistic alignment.

The proposed tests can distinguish true stylistic coordination from confounding effects.

Some stylistic coordination persists even after controlling for length and context.

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.