© Photo12 / AlamyConversational 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
Writeup in Nature News How movies mirror our mimicry: Scriptwriters have internalized the unconscious social habits of everyday conversation
@inproceedings{Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil+Lee:11a, author = {Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee}, title = {Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialog}, year = {2011}, pages = {76--87}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics} }
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Supported by NSF IIS-0910664, the Yahoo! FREP program, and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or other sponsors.