Measuring Conversational Alignment

Saturday, 14 February 2015: 1:30 PM-4:30 PM
Room LL21B (San Jose Convention Center)
Fermın Moscoso del Prado Martin, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA
The degree to which dialogue participants are emotionally aligned is reflected in their syntax. Higher levels of emotional alignment are predicted to result in a higher degree of "syntactic priming" across speakers. This is investigated on human dialogue corpora with measures borrowed from information theory, considering previously overlooked aspects of the temporal alignment in priming studies. The corpus results are then related to human ratings of the degree of attachment in a conversation.