Counting Words & Phrases - Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al 2012

[jamesallenevans]

Post questions here for:

3. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Lillian Lee, B. Pang, and John Kleinberg. 2012. “Echoes of Power: Language Effects and Power Differences in Social Interaction.” Proc. 21st Int. Conf. World Wide Web: 699–708.

[katykoenig]

I found it interesting that the paper compares the difference in linguistic coordination between people in different levels of power and that it further compares this baseline levels of coordination (as determined by personal characteristics), but I question if this addresses that people tend to mirror (coordinate) when they are getting along. Could linguistic coordination be explained by good/happy feelings from friendliness/harmonious conversation as the paper states that favorable Justices coordinate more than unfavorable Justices?

[laurenjli]

The authors use word counting in an interesting way. They measure coordination by counting frequency of words are used in one person’s speech compared to the frequency in another person’s reply and ultimately show that how much one echoes the other can reveal different power dynamics.

It is often said that friends mimic each other’s speech. The paper purposefully used conversations that had a purpose and were not “idle chat”. However, if using my conversational text, could this type of analysis extend to analyze text to be able to see how friends or people in close relationships mimic each other’s language?

[di-Tong]

This article demonstrates a very interesting design to track power relation using linguistic coordination measure. As we can also use substantive contents (the appearance of specific words, etc.) or structural information (turns-taking, etc.) to measure power differences, I wonder if there're other works that compare how consistent the results produced by these different measurements are. I'm also curious about whether different types of linguistic coordination or use of specific words could differentiate between different types of power differences (status-based, dependency-based, etc.)?

[rachel-ker]

I found this article really interesting in using unconscious mimicking to understand power differentials. I wonder how this could be used when the power status is not so clear as in the two cases where admins and judges are clearly status of higher power known from the onset. It was interesting for me to see the gender power dynamics that may be a lot more subtle than the explicit statuses in Figure 6. Would it be possible to use it to understand how group power dynamics evolve over time for a group of people who do not have prescribed roles?

However, it seems difficult (even after this study) to go the other way round and use linguistic coordination as evidence for power differentials. Would there be other studies that rule out other potential reasons for linguistic coordination?

[Lizfeng]

This article looks into how language coordination in text content can serve as a rich source of information about power differences within a group. One assumption here is that "B: people have a baseline coordination level, which is determined by personal characteristics (such as their sociability and level of social engagement)." This assumption leads to one of my concerns about this research. The group of the administrator of Wikipedia may have distinguishing personal characteristics that are reflected in their level of language coordination. The researcher tries to separate the effects of status on language coordination from these personal characteristics but I think these two variables, status and personal characteristics, are not independent of each other.

[YanjieZhou]

In this articles, the concept of language coordination serves as an imperative instrument, or bridge connecting the text and the analyses of participants' status. However, it is based on the use of English grammar like prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns in English contexts, which may not be applicable to other languages. Hence I am wondering whether this research can cross the borders of different languages or if there is any particularity of this research that stems from English itself.

[alakira]

The article empirically shows language coordination in English which emerges from power structure during text/speech interactions. However, in the other language which has structural honorifics (e.g. Japanese), it is easy and thus uninteresting to just identify those structure. My question is that how can we apply this quantitative approach to more interesting question? For example, can we quantitatively say that the person thinks interlocutor has more power if he shows more language coordination to that person?

[cindychu]

This article is very interesting and successful in figuring out the influence of personal characteristics (B hypothesis) and power states (P hypothesis). The authors found the influence of both factors, their interaction effect and successfully separated their single effect as well.

I have a question about how did the author distinguish the utterances of speaker which specifically targets at the other person? since it is an online community, it could be hard to distinguish the dialogue happened between two people. and if the utterance is not specific to these two people, it might be very susceptible to other factors among the whole online community, like the overall linguistic styles in this community.

[skanthan95]

1) Like several of my peers, I'm curious as to how these findings might extrapolate to languages besides English (especially, languages that use honorifics) ->. In the given sample- what if some speakers in the group did not speak English as a first language? Depending on the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the Justices and lawyers in the sample, some might have been more primed to speak deferentially to others, regardless of their designation - even if they were of equal "status"- and this might not have been correctly coded. Given that the findings hinge on the idea that lower status individuals engage in language coordination differently than higher status individuals, these influences are critical.

2) Can an individual's emoji-choice indicate their position in a given power dynamic, or are the findings unique to textual data?

[yirouf]

This article is particularly interesting that it provides us with a new way of looking into power dynamics through the lens of linguistic perspectives. Mirroring is the term in psychology. When people want to be close to a person/ or to make target people like them, they tend to mirror other's behavior. In this situation, people mirror other's choice of function word classes. Which is a really interesting concept. Also, counting words is used as a way of calculating the degree of coordination, but I think I have questions that people already stated about this, wouldn't it be very difficult to implement in other languages as a linguistic aspect of power dynamic is very different from language to language?

[ziwnchen]

This article about the power relationship in social interaction is fascinating! I'm interested in extending it to multiple networks. In modern society, individuals usually have multiple roles in different networks. For example, two people might be employer and employee in the workplace, good friends after work, and even relatives in kinship. My question is, will the power relationship in one network influence the social interaction in another network? For example, people may still "echo" their boss's word even in private situations. Will this cross-network power influence varies between western and eastern cultures?

[chun-hu]

This article is super interesting! I'm especially surprised to find out that the properties of the language used by individuals with "lower power" will tend to escape conscious attention and echo the linguistic style of the person they are responding to. Since the article employed special cases where the conversation is not "idle chat" and individuals have their prescribed role, I wonder if we can replicate the result in our daily conversations, e.g. group discussion...

[yaoxishi]

Very different from other research that looks at the conversation at a more macro level, this paper shows how variations in linguistic style (a micro level) can provide information about power differences within social groups. While the authors develop a new method observing language coordination, there are many other ways that reveal the power dynamics in conversations, such as one person significantly agree more with another person etc, therefore I am curious to see whether we can combine several signals in conversation to detect power.

[meowtiann]

It actually found cases for power differences. Wikipedia admin and court are very clever cases. I would like to know how mimicking looks like among high-power talkers and low-power talkers. We might see some characteristics tied to high-power talkers and some to low-power talkers, that might contribute to the interaction between high and low power.

[cytwill]

I appreciated that the authors narrow down the definition of coordination to a very specific scope, so the research would have a kind of reasonable access to measure the coordination in language use. But I think what needs to be improved is also their idea of coordination because I doubted that sometimes we are more likely to imitate the keywords of somebody's talk if we need to show our coordination instead of changing our speaking style. The language markers mentioned in the article might not be able to capture this kind of variations because they are usually not related to the content/keywords of those conversations.

Also, I am not sure if the authors pay attention to the problem of paraphrasing. Even with those language markers, people could respond with their synonyms to show their willingness to coordinate. I think this should be evaluated in the definition of language coordination.

[kdaej]

I think this article begins with a very interesting point about power differences detected by language. While this article focuses on the power differences, I was wondering if using a similar language with the ones in power can help to persuade them more efficiently rather than using provocative language. Hence, linguistic coordination is an intentional decision by people in lower power to persuade or to gain more leverage in the conversation with those in higher power.