Open-Mindedness and Style Coordination in Argumentative Discussions (2021)

Abstract: Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation correlates with gaps in the power and status of the speakers and the way it promotes approval and discussion efficiency. In this work, we provide a novel perspective on the phenomena, exploring its correlation with the open-mindedness of a speaker, rather than to her social status. We process thousands of unstructured argumentative discussions that took place in Reddit’s Change My View (CMV) subreddit, demonstrating that open-mindedness relates to the assumed role of a speaker in different contexts. On the discussion level, we surprisingly find that discussions that reach agreement present lower levels of accommodation.

## introduction 1.linguistic accommodation accommodation in personal communication refers to the unconscious process in which a speaker changes (accommodates) her communicative behavior with respect to the communication partner. the change can be manifested across many dimensions, e.g., posture @xcite , nodding @xcite , pauses @xcite , and linguistic style @xcite . from the perspective of sociolinguistic and social-psychology, accommodation is argued to increase cognitive efficiency @xcite , provide approval and validation @xcite , and project the speaker's positive image @xcite . in this work we focus on the accommodation of the linguistic style -the usage of stylistic markers and function words, such as auxiliary verbs and prepositions. @xcite estimated that style and function words make up for 55% of the words we use. these markers shape the conversation regardless of its topical content. analysis of function-word usage is common in many nlp tasks, e.g., gender detection @xcite @xcite , forensic linguistics @xcite @xcite and personality type detection @xcite @xcite , among others. accommodation is not necessarily a symmetric process. one party in a communication can accommodate while the other party can either accommodate as well (converge), sustain her behavior, or actively diverge. linguistic style accommodation was first studied quantitatively by @xcite , analyzing the linguistic style accommodation in a small scale dataset. large scale datasets and advanced statistical and algorithmic methods were explored by @xcite ; @xcite ; @xcite , among others. differences in the social status of the speakers were found to dominate accommodation @xcite . in this paper we explore linguistic accommodation from a novel perspective. we argue that the speaker's open-mindedness drives her linguistic coordination. while the speaker's open-mindedness can be "socially forced" by power relations -it is also inherent to one's character and her actively assumed social role. ## related work linguistic coordination, sometimes referred to as 'accommodation' or 'matching', is mainly studied from two perspectives -social (-psychology) and computational. linguistic style matching in social interactions and its correlation to various psychometric properties of language was first studied by @xcite . this approach was later generalized to discussions in small groups by @xcite . these metrics were applied to social media data by @xcite . @xcite analyzed a large corpus of online debate, reporting that debaters using agreement expressions (e.g., 'i agree with that point', 'rightly said') as a debate strategy show higher linguistic accommodation than debaters that explicitly express disagreement (e.g., 'i don't buy it', 'i disagree', 'nonsense'). however, the use of agreement/disagreement expressions in a formal debate setting is a strategic choice and does not imply actual agreement or open-mindedness. moreover, the stated objective in a formal debate is winning the debate, rather than self-reflection through convincing argumentation. power differences were found to drive linguistic coordination toward the speaker with the higher status @xcite , and a particular configurations of personal traits (e.g., agreeableness, machiavellianism, low selfconsciousness) combined with low-power position were shown to increase the likelihood of coordination @xcite . @xcite proposed bayesian inference approach to capture influence manifested through linguistic accommodation. this work is the first to explore coordination through the lens of open-mindedness, rather than through self-awareness, power, influence or strategic manipulation. ## results and analysis all of the hypothesis presented above are tested using the two-sample t-test. we report significance values for the following p-values: 0.05, 0.01 and 0.001. conversations are extracted from the discussion data described in section 1.3, containing 1.3m utterances by 87k unique users participating in 9.3k discussions.