Linguistic Adaptation in Conversation Threads: Analyzing Alignment in Online Health Communities

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.