Abstract

Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexical coordination or entrainment in literature, only a few have explored coordination in syntactic or semantic space. In this work, we attempt to combine these different aspects of coordination into a single measure by leveraging distances in a neural word representation space. In particular, we adopt the recently proposed Word Mover’s Distance with word2vec embeddings and extend it to measure the dissimilarity in language used in multiple consecutive speaker turns. To validate our approach, we apply this measure for two case studies in the clinical psychology domain. We find that our proposed measure is correlated with the therapist’s empathy towards their patient in Motivational Interviewing and with affective …

Date

2019

Authors

Md Nasir, Sandeep Nallan Chakravarthula, Brian Baucom, David C Atkins, Panayiotis Georgiou, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Interspeech

Volume

2019

Pages

1423