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Revisiting the Phenomenon of Syntactic Complexity Convergence on German Dialogue Data

Yu Wang, Hendrik Buschmeier

Abstract

We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.

Revisiting the Phenomenon of Syntactic Complexity Convergence on German Dialogue Data

Abstract

We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.
Paper Structure (8 sections, 2 equations, 2 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 8 sections, 2 equations, 2 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Dependency Structure
  4. Syntactic Complexity
  5. Data
  6. Methods
  7. Results and Discussion
  8. Conclusions

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Two examples showing the dependency structure syntactic relationships according to UD. Edges are directed from heads to dependents.
  • Figure 2: Comparing the development of syntactic complexity of dialogue initiators (left) and followers (right) over the course of the interactions in each corpus. Shaded areas are bootstrapped $95\%$ confidence intervals.