Alignment in Web-based Dialogue: Who Aligns, and How Automatic Is It? Studies in Big-Data Computational Psycholinguistics
David Reitter · Psychology Press eBooks · 2016
In this chapter, I will survey studies on linguistic alignment in order to connect the inferences we make from large datasets to the psycholinguistics of dialogue. This work is motivated by a high-level question: How does our mind select and combine words in a way that reliably communicates our intentions to a dialogue partner? The search for a computational answer to this question has been revitalized in recent years by the advent of large datasets. Large data give us a window into an individual’s mind and a cooperative process between minds. It allows us to look at how dialogue partners gradually converge in their choices of words and sentence structure, thereby creating a shared language.