Understanding confounding effects in linguistic coordination: an information-theoretic approach
This addresses methodological issues in linguistics research for more accurate analysis of dialogue coordination, though it is incremental in refining existing measures.
The paper tackles the problem of measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues by proposing an information-theoretic approach that accounts for confounding factors like length coordination, finding that much of the observed coordination is spurious and can be attributed to simple length effects.
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.