Analysis of Linguistic Style Accommodation in Online Debates

Psycholinguistic phenomenon of communication accommodation (Giles et al., 1991) is probably one of the most important contributions in the interdisciplinary field of linguistics, psychology, information, and communication theory. Existing works have applied this theory to various domains like gesture, linguistics, backchannels, and even social media like tweets. In this work, we analyze the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic style accommodation in online debates. First, we present a Joint Topic Expression (JTE) model for modeling debate posts and use it to generate our unique dataset for studying accommodation in debates. Specifically, we analyze the phenomenon across agreeing/disagreeing debating pairs generated using our JTE model. Second, we propose a formal framework for analyzing the linguistic phenomena of accommodation in online debates. Experiments on a large collection of real-life debate posts reveal very interesting insights about the complex phenomenon of psycholinguistic accommodation in online debates.