TY - GEN
T1 - Not that much power
T2 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2018
AU - Xu, Yang
AU - Cole, Jeremy
AU - Reitter, David
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Association for Computational Linguistics
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Linguistic alignment between dialogue partners has been claimed to be affected by their relative social power. A common finding has been that interlocutors of higher power tend to receive more alignment than those of lower power. However, these studies overlook some low-level linguistic features that can also affect alignment, which casts doubts on these findings. This work characterizes the effect of power on alignment with logistic regression models in two datasets, finding that the effect vanishes or is reversed after controlling for low-level features such as utterance length. Thus, linguistic alignment is explained better by low-level features than by social power. We argue that a wider range of factors, especially cognitive factors, need to be taken into account for future studies on observational data when social factors of language use are in question.
AB - Linguistic alignment between dialogue partners has been claimed to be affected by their relative social power. A common finding has been that interlocutors of higher power tend to receive more alignment than those of lower power. However, these studies overlook some low-level linguistic features that can also affect alignment, which casts doubts on these findings. This work characterizes the effect of power on alignment with logistic regression models in two datasets, finding that the effect vanishes or is reversed after controlling for low-level features such as utterance length. Thus, linguistic alignment is explained better by low-level features than by social power. We argue that a wider range of factors, especially cognitive factors, need to be taken into account for future studies on observational data when social factors of language use are in question.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85063082054&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85063082054&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.18653/v1/p18-1056
DO - 10.18653/v1/p18-1056
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85063082054
T3 - ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
SP - 601
EP - 610
BT - ACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Y2 - 15 July 2018 through 20 July 2018
ER -