Paper Info
Title
Chameleons in imagined conversations: a new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs
Abstract
Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters adapt more to females than to males.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2011
CMCL '11 Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
next utterance,function word,new approach,conversational participant,understanding coordination,social goal,linguistic style,significant coordination,fictional dialog,language-generation process,social benefit,language style,adaptation mechanism
Field
DocType
Volume
Computer science,Utterance,Social benefits,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Linguistics
Journal
abs/1106.3077
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
Proceedings of the ACL workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pp 76-87, 2011
11
0.77
References 
Authors
19
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil193548.42
Lillian Lee27572754.70