Neural Networks 32 (2012) 159–164

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Neural Networks
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neunet

2012 Special Issue

Assessing cognitive alignment in different types of dialog by means of a

network model✩
Alexander Mehler a,∗ , Andy Lücking a , Peter Menke b
a
Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Text Technology Group, Germany
b
Bielefeld University, CRC 673 ‘‘Alignment in Communication’’, Germany

article info abstract

Keywords: We present a network model of dialog lexica, called TiTAN (Two-layer Time-Aligned Network) series. TiTAN
Alignment
series capture the formation and structure of dialog lexica in terms of serialized graph representations. The
Task-oriented dialog
dynamic update of TiTAN series is driven by the dialog-inherent timing of turn-taking. The model provides
Spontaneous dialog
Networks a link between neural, connectionist underpinnings of dialog lexica on the one hand and observable
Similarity symbolic behavior on the other. On the neural side, priming and spreading activation are modeled in
terms of TiTAN networking. On the symbolic side, TiTAN series account for cognitive alignment in terms of
the structural coupling of the linguistic representations of dialog partners. This structural stance allows us
to apply TiTAN in machine learning of data of dialogical alignment. In previous studies, it has been shown
that aligned dialogs can be distinguished from non-aligned ones by means of TiTAN -based modeling. Now,
we simultaneously apply this model to two types of dialog: task-oriented, experimentally controlled
dialogs on the one hand and more spontaneous, direction giving dialogs on the other. We ask whether
it is possible to separate aligned dialogs from non-aligned ones in a type-crossing way. Starting from a
recent experiment (Mehler, Lücking, & Menke, 2011a), we show that such a type-crossing classification
is indeed possible. This hints at a structural fingerprint left by alignment in networks of linguistic items
that are routinely co-activated during conversation.
© 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Background: alignment, neural representations, and dialog
types
In spite of language’s often stressed creativity, human conver-
sations are surprisingly formulaic: speakers use a lot of fixed ex-
pressions like idioms (Čermák, 2007), turn-taking management
of interlocutors draws on adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jef-
ferson, 1974), proverbs (Norrick, 2007) are used to express com-
monplaces, amongst others, (frozen) metaphors convey similes
(Kövecses, 2002), and institutionalized speech provides com-
municative ‘‘ready-mades’’ for official communication situations
(Miller, 1994) (see also Bazzanella, 1996; Tannen, 2007). The differ-
ent sorts of formulaic speech have in common that they are learned
and represented holistically. This is because the meaning, for in-
stance, of an idiom like learn by heart is not composed of the mean-
ings of the words involved in terms of compositional semantics.
✩ Support for this work by the German Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (Linguistic Networks project) and the German Research Foundation (CRC
673 Alignment in Communication) is gratefully acknowledged.
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: mehler@em.uni-frankfurt.de (A. Mehler),
luecking@em.uni-frankfurt.de (A. Lücking), peter.menke@uni-bielefeld.de
(P. Menke).
0893-6080/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2012.02.013
Rather, being an idiomatic phrase, learn by heart is mentally treated
as a single item (Jackendoff, 2002, pp. 65–67), which is in toto as-
sociated with a meaning. Thus, the meaning of a formulaic expres-
sion does not need to be constructed online in a conversation, but
is lexically stored (Jackendoff, 2002, Chap. 6). Being lexicalized, for-
mulas are at immediate disposal for production (Kuiper, 1996). For
this reason, such ‘‘prefabricated components’’ of language provide
a short circuit between production and comprehension. Due to this
special status, the use of formulaic expressions is comparatively
resource-free. The usage of lexicalized phrases allows speakers to
reduce memory loads and is especially tailored to routine conver-
sation tasks. As a result, formulaic speech is highly fluent and in-
terpretable without effort (Kuiper, 2000).
However, speakers are not confined to take only the lexicalized
phrasal expressions offered by their native language. Rather, they
interactively create their own, mutually shared routines within
their conversations by automatically aligning their linguistic
representations. Recently, the diverse findings on alignment in
dialog on the phonetic/phonological (Giles & Powesland, 1975),
the lexical (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), the syntactic (Branigan,
Pickering, & Cleland, 2000), and the semantic (Garrod & Anderson,
1987) level have been amalgamated by Pickering and Garrod
(2004) into the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM). One central
claim of the IAM is that dyads (i.e., pairs of dialog partners) build
160 A. Mehler et al. / Neural Networks 32 (2012) 159–164
Fig. 1. From priming to alignment. A linguistic form /a/ activates its representation
a and co-activates representation b connected to a. Both sorts of priming occur
in the speaker and the hearer, leading to activated representations shared among
interlocutors. If the same activation patterns are triggered repeatedly, the synaptic
connections involved become routinized.
up a set of expressions specific to their dialog: a ‘‘dialog lexicon’’.
(Pickering & Garrod, 2004, p. 184). The dialog lexicon contains
routinized expressions which are repeatedly used within a dyad
with a fixed function or meaning. ‘‘Such routinized expressions
are similar to stock phrases and idioms [14], except that they
only ‘‘live’’ for the particular interaction. Routinization greatly
simplifies the production process [15] and gets around problems
of ambiguity resolution in comprehension’’. (Garrod & Pickering,
2004, p. 10) ([14] is a reference to Jackendoff, 2002 and [15] to
Kuiper, 1996). Thus, expressions of the dialog lexicon that are
routinely used, have a cognitive status analogous to formulas.
According to contemporary neuroscience, lexicalized items are
cortically represented as distributed neuron webs (Pulvermüller,
2002, Chap. 4). Connections between items in memory are in-
stantiated by spreading activation (Jackendoff, 2002, p. 65). The
cortical realization of linguistic representations allows for ground-
ing the alignment process physically in terms of priming. Here,
two notions of priming have to be distinguished, namely ac-
tivation and co-activation: a linguistic item /a/ immediately
activates its corresponding mental representation a within the
neuron web of a speaker; a linguistic item /a/ co-activates a rep-
resentation b that is connected to a mediated by the activation of
a. To illustrate priming and the activation/co-activation distinction
in terms of a linguistic example: the word form /bird/ activates
the lexical item bird. Additionally, the representations ostrich and
worm may be co-activated. Ostrich is connected to bird semanti-
cally, since ostriches are a special kind of bird (viz. ratite). The form
/bird/ primes worm associatively, because it is the early bird that
gets the worm. Fig. 1 illustrates these matters. Since under nor-
mal conditions occurrences of word forms are perceived by the
speaker (via self-monitoring) and by the hearer, priming processes
triggered by these occurrences happen within both interlocutors.
From this perspective, routines can be understood as synaptic con-
nections that ‘‘emerge’’ as stable sub-configurations within neu-
ron nets. In this sense, reinforcement of connections in a neural net
provides an explanans of long-term memorizing of dialog routines.
Note that there are additional sources of alignment (Garrod &
Pickering, 2007, Section 26.2). Higher-level representations as, for
example, partner models and processes of explicit negotiation also
play a role in aligning mental representations. However, priming
as a neural motor (of activation and co-activation) is a key factor.
Despite its rather automatic mechanism, alignment of repre-
sentations is a matter of degree. The range of both extremes (full
alignment versus no alignment) spans a continuum depending on
how ‘‘many aspects of the representation[s] will be shared’’ (Pick-
ering & Garrod, 2004, p. 172). This scalar nature makes the degree
of dialogical alignment accessible to empirical measurements. In
the past, there have been such measurements on the level of lexi-
cal (Church, 2000) and syntactic priming (Branigan et al., 2000).
Furthermore, a difference in the degree of alignment has been
reported between instances of different types of dialog, namely
between task-oriented and more spontaneous dialogs (Reitter,
Keller, & Moore, 2006; Reitter, Moore, & Keller, 2006). These
authors investigated syntactic priming, that is, speakers’ tendency
to repeat previously used syntactic patterns, by means of text
data from the Switchboard (Godfrey, Holliman, & McDaniel, 1992)
(spontaneous) and the MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) (task-
oriented) corpus. They found that both kinds of dialog show
nearly the same degree of within-speaker priming while between-
speaker priming was stronger in the task-oriented corpus than in
the spontaneous one.
While these studies do not employ a control condition, Healey,
Howes, and Purver (2010) and Howes, Healey, and Purver (2010)
tested for syntactic priming against a random baseline. The authors
used dialog data from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken
English (DCPSE). Repetitions of syntactic patterns were compared
between original dialogs and ‘‘fake’’ dialogs that were created by
interleaving turns from the whole corpus. The authors found that
‘‘people’s level of structural (syntactic) matching is no different
from chance’’. (Healey et al., 2010, p. 3). The asymmetry of the
extent of alignment as a result of switching the dialog type could
not be replicated either (Howes et al., 2010, p. 2006). A related
result has been reported by Hadelich, Pickering, Branigan, and
Crocker (2004) concerning alignment on the lexical level. They
concluded that ‘‘subsequent descriptions in the verbal feedback
conditions do not necessarily have to be driven by an automatic
tendency to align on a name, but could also show effects of this
collaboration’’. (Hadelich et al., 2004, pp. 39–40).
These findings pose the question whether assessments on
alignment can be generalized from one type of dialog to another.
More specifically, they question whether alignment, at least on
the lexical and syntactic level, plays a role in dialog as important
as claimed by the IAM. From this perspective, lexical or syntactic
alignment may be seen as artifacts of the operative dialog type,
rather than being affected by neural processes of routinization.
In other words, alignment could be a result of some function of
the type of dialog (e.g., ‘‘collaboration’’), rather than being a result
of common processes of spreading activation and their neural
reinforcement.
In order to make progress in deciding on this issue, a methodic
improvement has to be made. As we argued elsewhere (Mehler,
Lücking, & Weiß, 2010), simply counting repetitions of items in a
dialog misses the structural aspect of linking between these items.
Accordingly, in Mehler et al. (2010) the TiTAN model for assessing
alignment in dialog has been developed that goes beyond counting
repeated items by accounting for the co-activation of associated
items and the formation of routines over time. In previous machine
learning studies, TiTAN modeling has been successfully applied
to task-oriented data of the Jigsaw Map Game Corpus (Weiß,
Pfeiffer, Schaffranietz, & Rickheit, 2008) and on more spontaneous,
direction giving dialogs from the SaGA corpus (Lücking, Bergmann,
Hahn, Kopp, & Rieser, 2010). In both cases, dialogs that manifest
alignment could be separated from less or non-aligned ones
(Mehler et al., 2011a; Mehler, Lücking, & Menke, 2011b). In this
article, we apply the TiTAN model in an experiment on classifying
dialogs of different type. That is, we investigate whether the class
of aligned dialogs can be identified across different types of dialog.
A successful classification can be seen as a hint at a structural
fingerprint left by alignment, independent of the underlying type
of dialog. Conversely, in the case that our experiment replicates
the afore-mentioned findings even by means of the improved TiTAN
method, it would give us one more reason to rethink the status of
alignment in dialog.
The article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we recapitulate
the TiTAN model. In Section 3, we describe experimental dialog data
that we use for our type-crossing classification. The classification
experiment is described and discussed in Section 4. Finally,
Section 5 gives a conclusion and a prospect on future work.
 A. Mehler et al. / Neural Networks 32 (2012) 159–164
2. Two-layer Time-Aligned Network (TiTAN) series
In this section, we describe the TiTAN (Two-layer Time-Aligned
Network) model. It was introduced in Mehler et al. (2010) as a
model of lexical alignment in dyadic conversations and empirically
tested using experimentally controlled and more spontaneous
dialogs (Mehler et al., 2011a, 2011b). A TiTAN is a bipartite graph
GAB that models the dialog lexicon of a dyadic conversation. GAB
is partitioned into the sub-graphs A and B that capture the sub-
lexica of the interlocutors involved. Networking within TiTAN is
done turn-wise. This results in a TiTAN series where at each time
point t a graph is emitted that models the operative lexicon at
time t. Formally speaking, a TiTAN is a graph GAB = (V , E ) whose
vertex set V is partitioned into non-empty disjunct subsets VA and
VB that collect the words used by interlocutor A and B, respectively.
Further, the set of edges E is sub-divided into three non-empty
disjunct subsets EAB , EA , EB so that all edges {v, w} ∈ EAB end at
vertices v ∈ A, w ∈ B, while all other edges {x, y} ∈ EX end at
vertices x, y ∈ VX , X ∈ {A, B}. EA and EB capture intrapersonal
priming relations, while EAB models relations of interpersonal
priming. GX = (VX , EX ), X ∈ {A, B}, is called the X -layer of GAB =
(V , E ) and is denoted by the projection function πX (GAB ) = GX .
In order to account for priming as a gradual process, TiTAN s are
further developed as weighted labeled graphs Lt = (V , Et , νt , LV ),
where t ∈ N is a time stamp indicating the dialog turn at which
Lt was created. The vertices v ∈ V are labeled by the surjective
function L : V → LV . In the case of lexical alignment, LV consists
of lemmas, but in principle any kind of linguistic items can be
considered. Thus, πA (Lt ) = LAt = (VA , EAt , νAt , LA ) and πB (Lt ) =
LBt = (VB , EBt , νBt , LB ) are the sub-lexica of interlocutor A and B,
respectively. Networking within a TiTAN is done according to the
following construction rules Mehler et al. (2010, p. 1453):
• Intrapersonal links: if at time t, agent X ∈ {A, B} uses a
form belonging to lemma l to express the current turn’s topic
T = T (t ), we generate intrapersonal links between vX ∈ VX ,
LX (vX ) = l, and all other vertices labeled by items that X has
used in the same round or in the preceding round on the
same topic T . If these links already exist, their weights are
incremented by 1. A round is defined as a series of consecutive
turns on the same topic.
• Interpersonal links: if at time t, agent X ∈ {A, B} uses l ∈ Vt
to express topic T = T (t ) that has been expressed by Y ̸= X
in the same or preceding round on the same topic by the same
item, we span an interpersonal link e = {vA , wB } ∈ Et between
vA ∈ VA and wB ∈ VB for which LA (vA ) = LB (wB ) = l, given
that e does not already exist. Otherwise, its weight νt (e) is
incremented by 1.
These construction rules implement priming as a short-term
effect. However, this procedure can easily be adapted to account for
more delayed priming effects. Fig. 2 gives a visualization of a TiTAN
series. Initially, the lexica of both interlocutors are completely
disconnected. The update mechanism defined by the construction
rules connects these lexica turn-wise by intra- and interpersonal
edges so that the resulting TiTAN LAB maps the patterns of short-
term lexical priming as manifested by the underlying dialog.
TiTAN comes with an original measure of the degree of
structural coupling of the dialog lexica of interlocutors. The
measure is derived from a distance measure D(X ; Y ) of Kraskov
and Grassberger (2008) that is based on the mutual information
I (X ; Y ) of two random variables X and Y :
161
alignment channel
Fig. 2. TiTAN series. The initially unlinked lexica of interlocutors A and B
are networked turn-wise. The terminal dialog lexicon is linked by intra- and
interpersonal edges. Interpersonal links represent the ‘‘alignment channel’’.
I (X ; Y )
D(X , Y ) = 1 − ∈ [0, 1]. (1)
max(H (X ), H (Y ))
The measure follows the idea that if X and Y are statistically
independent, then X and Y are maximally distant. Utilizing this
scheme, Mehler et al. (2010) developed a measure of the similarity
of sub-lexica of dialog lexica, that is, a graph similarity measure.
The TiTAN model gives an intuitive account of extreme values
of alignment in communication. The one extreme of complete
alignment is given by a conversation in which both interlocutors
(unrealistically) use the same words always in the same way so
that their dialog lexica are finally identically structured around
the same vocabulary. If, conversely, the interlocutors always use
different words or the same words always in different ways, their
dialog lexica get maximally dissimilar. The technical details of this
model are given in (Mehler et al., 2010, Section 4.2) together with
a range of random models for which it is shown that they do not
account for the structure of dialog lexica as captured by the TiTAN
model. The interested reader is asked to refer to this publication for
a formal account of TiTAN series, a range of their random baselines
and their exemplary build-up.
As we deal with a type-crossing classification of dialogs we
need to take care not to characterize dialog lexica according to the
distinction of their underlying dialog types. More specifically, we
deal with two types of dialog: strictly task-oriented, experimen-
tally controlled dialogs on the one hand and more spontaneous,
direction giving dialogs on the other. Obviously, these dialogs can
be distinguished by the experimental setting that underlies the
task-oriented dialogs, which guarantees that, other than in the case
of more spontaneous dialogs, turns are more evenly distributed
among interlocutors. Having this in mind, we depart from Mehler
et al. (2011a) by disregarding all network indices that focus on sub-
lexica of single interlocutors in isolation. Further, we also disregard
the graph similarity measure of the TiTAN model as it assumes a
special position of reference vertices that holds dialog-wide—such
a special position cannot be assumed for more spontaneous dialogs
whose turn-taking and topic selection are not controlled experi-
mentally. Therefore, we recalculated the quantitative profiles of all
dialogs of both types of dialog anew. The underlying dialog data of
this calculation is described in the next section.
3. Data: quantitative comparison of both corpora
This section summarizes and compares quantitative character-
istics of both corpora under consideration: (i) the Jigsaw Map Game
162 A. Mehler et al. / Neural Networks 32 (2012) 159–164
Table 1
Quantitative characteristics of the JMG corpus and the SaGA corpus.
Level JMG corpus SaGA corpus
Dialogs 64 25
Turns/utterances 28,380 6413
Words 93,120 45,048
Length (s) 821.2 719.4
Size (turns) 441.4 249.6
Size (words) 1418.8 1801.9
Turns/min. 32.3 20.8
Words/min. 103.7 150.3
(JMG) corpus as a collection of strictly task-oriented, experimen-
tally controlled dialogs (Weiß et al., 2008); (ii) the Speech and Ges-
ture Alignment (SaGA) corpus as a collection of more spontaneous,
direction giving dialogs (Lücking et al., 2010). Both corpora have
been collected and assembled by the Collaborative Research Centre
673 Alignment in Communication (www.sfb673.org). Table 1 shows
characteristics for both corpora. The JMG corpus consists of 64 di-
alogs that have been transcribed on the level of utterances and
words. In addition, events and event phases of the underlying game
have been annotated as well as morphological analyses and repairs
of critical words. The SaGA corpus contains 25 dialogs. In addition
to the transcription of turns, topics and words, a detailed anno-
tation of gestures has been done. The concepts of turns and utter-
ances refer to the same structure, namely, to contiguous sequences
of words (and word-like elements like hesitations and turn keeping
signals).
Average values for several measures of dialog size are summa-
rized in Table 1. While the average lengths of dialogs in both cor-
pora are rather similar, both corpora diverge in the number of turns
per dialog as well as in the number of words per dialog: on aver-
age, the SaGA corpus contains fewer turns and more words than
the JMG corpus. There is an obvious explanation for this difference
between the two types of dialog: in the JMG setting, participants
switch roles (instructor and constructor) on a regular and frequent
basis. In the SaGA setting, one person has the role of description
giver throughout the dialog, while the other participant does not
necessarily have to produce turns on a regular basis—a common
strategy in these dialogs was for the description giver to elaborate
on landmarks and objects in lengthy turns, with one or few con-
cluding feedback signals by the follower. There is also a difference
in the number of turns or words per minute, respectively: since the
average dialog length is similar, there are fewer turns per minute
and more words per minute in the SaGA corpus.
4. Classifying dialogs in a type-crossing experiment
As the types of dialog corpora described in Section 3 vary
tremendously in terms of their underlying experimental setting
and, thus, by their linguistic structure, one can ask for a classifier
that nevertheless separates the class of aligned dialogs in both
corpora from their non-aligned counterparts. In the JMG corpus,
we observed 47 dialogs that manifest alignment, while 8 dialogs
were judged to manifest no alignment. Conversely, in the SaGA
corpus we observed 8 successful directions in contrast to 17
incorrect ones. Based on that, we build a type-crossing corpus
of 80 dialogs out of which 55 dialogs manifest alignment (or
effective communication), while 25 dialogs manifest no alignment
(or ineffective communication). After having represented each of
these dialogs by a separate TiTAN series, we seek a classifier that
learns this separation from the TiTAN models of the corresponding
dialog lexica. This is done with the help of Quantitative Network
Analysis, which implements a semi-supervised classifier that is
informed about the number of target classes—in our case, these
are two classes: dialogs manifesting alignment and dialogs that
Table 2
Summary of the results of QNA reported in (Mehler et al., 2011a, 2011b). The last
column denotes the number of features output by the genetic search.
No. Corpus Procedure F -score Selection
1 JMG QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.92284 47/103
2 JMG Random baseline known-partition 0.75073
3 JMG Random baseline equi-partition 0.61788
4 SaGA QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.96057 16/50
5 SaGA Random baseline known-partition 0.58668
6 SaGA Random baseline equi-partition 0.58583
Table 3
Summary of the results of re-performing QNA separately for the JMG and SaGA data
by using a subset of 60 topological indices.
No. Corpus Procedure F -score Selection
1 JMG QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.86675 26/60
2 SaGA QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.91651 22/60
do not. Generally speaking, QNA learns classes of networks by
their distinctive topological features. Starting from a classification
of a set of networks, QNA seeks structural features that best
distinguish these networks according to this classification. This
involves three steps of modeling (Mehler et al., 2011a): (i) Graph
modeling: firstly, each target graph is represented by a vector of
topological indices that model its structure. Here, these indices
operate on the final state networks of the TiTAN series, that is, on
networks spanned for completed dialogs. (ii) Feature selection: a
genetic search is performed to find those topological features that
best separate the target classes. This search utilizes the F -measure
as the harmonic mean of precision and recall. (iii) Classification:
based on the selected feature vectors, a hierarchical agglomerative
clustering is performed together with a subsequent partitioning.
We use complete linkage and the Mahalanobis distance to perform
this step. For more details on QNA see Mehler et al. (2010).
In the present study, we considered 60 topological indices per
TiTAN to model the topological characteristics of the underlying
dialog. This includes, amongst others, graph entropy measures
(Dehmer, 2008), graph centrality measures and the spectrum of
measures studied in the theory of complex networks (Newman,
2003). The topological characteristics of TiTAN s that are captured
by these indices do not linearly separate the target classes. Rather,
lexical alignment is a latent variable that asks for a multitude of
indices to be learnt appropriately.
Using this range of 60 topological indices we start with re-
calculating the classification of aligned effective (aligned) versus
ineffective (not aligned) dialogs separately for both types of
dialog. Table 2 repeats our earlier findings for these two types
of dialog from Mehler et al. (2011a, 2011b). When recalculating
the classification using the novel set of 60 topological indices
that was used to guarantee comparability among both types of
dialog (see Section 2), we get the results reported in Table 3.
Obviously, the goodness of fit of the former experiment is more
or less approximated by the latter; however, we also observe a
decrease of the F -score. This means that by using the indices of
the latter experiment to perform the type-crossing classification,
it is somehow handicapped compared to its non-type-crossing
counterpart performed in Mehler et al. (2011a, 2011b).
Table 4 shows the results of the final type-crossing classifica-
tion of effective versus ineffective dialogs of both types of dialog
considered here. As the best performing type-crossing classifica-
tion performs with an F -score of around 83%, we can speak of a
successful classification. Note that the second and third best per-
forming classifications result in similar F -scores. Finally, if we com-
pute the corresponding random baselines (one of which assumes
an equipartition of the target classes, while the other is informed
 A. Mehler et al. / Neural Networks 32 (2012) 159–164 163

Table 4
Summary of the results of performing QNA in a type-crossing manner for the JMG and SaGA data by
using a subset of 60 topological indices.
No. Corpus Procedure F -score Selection

1 JMG ∪ SaGA QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.84174 14/60

2 JMG ∪ SaGA QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.83887 23/60
3 JMG ∪ SaGA QNA[Mahalanobis, complete] 0.83171 21/60
4 JMG ∪ SaGA Average over non-random results 0.83744 19.3̄/60
5 JMG ∪ SaGA Random baseline known-partition 0.57068
6 JMG ∪ SaGA Random baseline equi-partition 0.5601

about the exact cardinality of these classes), we see that both base-
lines are outperformed by our classification. Note also that the dis-
tance between the baselines and the target classification is even
higher than in the case of the single-type classification based on
the JMG corpus reported in Table 2 (the opposite is true for the
SaGA data). From this perspective, we can hardly state that our
type-crossing classification was not successful. Rather, we get first
classificatory evidence that it is possible to separate aligned dialogs
from non-aligned ones in a type-crossing way. This hints at a struc-
tural, though weak fingerprint left by alignment in networks of lin-
guistic items that are routinely co-activated during conversation.
4.1. Discussion
Our study provides a dialog type-crossing classification of align-
ment in communication. It does so in a purely structural way by
exploring networks of syntagmatic associations in dialog lexica.
Except for transcriptional work, this procedure is completely au-
tomatic. The results provide evidence for alignment being a gen-
eral (cognitive) effect, rather than just being a function of dialog
types—cf. the argument in Section 1. Thus, until any future falsifica-
tion, we can claim that TiTAN series provide a representational for-
mat for the effective classification of alignment in communication.
However, we need to take care not to overestimate this finding.
Generally speaking, there are two reference points of assessing
TiTAN series, a methodical and an empirical one, where the focus is
on the former: (i) Supposing that alignment is effective in a dialog
type-crossing way, we show that the TiTAN approach is not falsified
in detecting it. (ii) Along this line of reasoning, we may even state
that until any future falsification, we can retain the hypothesis that
the traces left behind by alignment are not restricted to a certain
class of dialogs. However, we do not yet know whether there are
independent reasons for the success of our classification that are
independent of what is called alignment in the IAM. In other words,
we do not give an explanation of the underlying cognitive pro-
cesses but only hint at a certain separability of their semiotic out-
put. Further, as this study focuses on lexical alignment it leaves out
other levels of linguistic resolution that may also provide evidence
of alignment, say, on the phrasal or, more generally, syntactic level.
Following Section 1, we expect that phrasal, formulaic expressions
tend to be dialog-type specific (Tannen, 2007, cf.). Thus, we expect
a smaller contribution by syntagmatic alignment in type-crossing
scenarios. In order to further clarify the classificatory power of
the TiTAN model in this area, we need to take into account larger
amounts of multiresolutional data of a wider range of dialog types.
However, the availability of such data is restricted by the enormous
effort of its preprocessing (resp. annotation). In any event, with the
advent of interactive interfaces the automatic processing of dialog-
ical data comes into the fore of computer science and related dis-
ciplines. Our study contributes to this kind of research.
5. Conclusion
We presented the TiTAN model to represent dialog data as
networks of lexical items. This has been done to get graph
representations of communication units as input to machine
learning. Our starting point was the Interactive Alignment Model
(IAM) of Pickering and Garrod (2004). By focusing on priming as
a neural motor of short-term alignment, we related the process of
lexical alignment to its neural counterpart in terms of spreading
activation and reinforcement learning. In order to show that this
alignment model is also operative in a type-crossing way, we
investigated two corpora that collect dialogs of two different
types. The reason for this was to shed light on the objection that
alignment is an artifact of the dialogical setting rather than a
general characteristic of human communication. Thus, we focused
on the question whether it is possible to separate aligned dialogs
from non-aligned ones in a type-crossing way. For this task,
we built a corpus that collects effective and ineffective dialogs
of different provenance, whose status of manifesting alignment
or not is conditioned by completely different experimental
settings. Even starting from such a heterogeneous corpus, the
classification that we performed by means of the TiTAN model
still outperformed its corresponding baseline scenarios. This is
a first hint at a structural fingerprint that might be left behind
by alignment. In future work, we plan to consider additional
dialogical data. However, as such data is hardly accessible due to
the enormous effort of manual annotations, we plan to additionally
explore discussions in Wikipedia since this data is also dialog-like
(by including turn-taking, adjacency pairs and multiple threads
of discussion). Finally, we plan to perform experiments that
investigate the exact nature of the structural fingerprints of
cognitive alignment.
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