@inproceedings{e41dae38f2a744a09d5e3a3ef1bed707,
title = "Linguistic Adaptation in Conversation Threads: Analyzing Alignment in Online Health Communities",
abstract = "Previous studies of alignment have focused on two-party conversations. We study multi-party conversation in online health communities, which have shown benefits for their members from forum conversations. So far, our understanding of the relationship between alignment in such multi-party conversations and its possible connection to member benefits has been limited. This paper quantifies linguistic alignment in the oldest and the largest cancer online forum. Alignment at lexical and syntactic levels, as well as decay of alignment was observed in forum threads, although the decay was slower than commonly found in psycholinguistic studies. The different pattern of adaptation to the initial post on a thread suggests that specific roles in the online forum (e.g., seeking support from the community) can potentially be revealed through alignment theory and its extensions.",
author = "Yafei Wang and David Reitter and John Yen",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2014 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. All rights reserved.; 5th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, CMCL 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 ; Conference date: 26-06-2014",
year = "2014",
month = jan,
day = "1",
language = "English",
series = "Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)",
pages = "55--62",
editor = "Vera Demberg and Tim O�Donnell",
booktitle = "5th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, CMCL 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Proceedings",
address = "United States",
}
