Syntax Accommodation in Social Media Conversations

The psycholinguistic theory of Communication Accommodation proposes that people modify communication dynamics (e.g. vocal patterns, gesture, word choice, syntax, etc.) to minimize (or maximize) their social differences. Research on communication accommodation has shown that people who want social approval will modify their linguistic style to match that of their interactant; however, most studies have been conducted on small-scale datasets and in laboratory situations. In this work, we investigate the relationship between linguistic syntactic usage and conversation participation in a more naturalistic conversational setting: social media conversations on Reddit.com. We introduce a novel approach for calculating document-level syntactic similarity by relying on natural language processing methods (parse tree generators) and graph theory techniques (minimum weight perfect matching on complete bipartite graphs). Using the proposed method, we present the results of two experiments which demonstrate that users who comment on a post tend to use syntax similar to that of the original post. Specifically, we provide evidence that comments on a post are more likely to follow the syntactic structure of the original post, compared to both random comments and also posts by the author of the comment.