Finding Zelig in text: A measure for normalising linguistic accommodation

Jones, Simon; Cotterill, Rachel; Dewdney, Nigel; Muir, Kate; Joinson, Adam

Abstract

Linguistic accommodation is a recognised indicator of social power and social distance. However, different individuals will vary their language to different degrees, and only a portion of this variance will be due to accommodation. This paper presents the Zelig Quotient, a method of normalising linguistic variation towards a particular individual, using an author’s other communications as a baseline, thence to derive a method for identifying accommodation-induced variation with statistical significance. This work provides a platform for future efforts towards examining the importance of such phenomena in large communications datasets.

Citation

Jones, S., Cotterill, R., Dewdney, N., Muir, K., & Joinson, A. (2014, August). Finding Zelig in text: A measure for normalising linguistic accommodation. Paper presented at Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
• Start Date: Aug 1, 2014
• End Date: Aug 1, 2014
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2014
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 455-465
• Keywords: Zeling, text, measure, linguistic
• Publisher URL: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C14-1044
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics