lingmatch: Linguistic Matching and Accommodation

In lingmatch: Linguistic Matching and Accommodation

Linguistic Matching and Accommodation

Description

Offers a variety of methods to assess linguistic matching or accommodation, where matching is general similarity (sometimes called homophily), and accommodation is some form of conditional similarity (accounting for some base-rate or precedent; sometimes called alignment).

Usage

lingmatch(input = NULL, comp = mean, data = NULL, group = NULL, ...,
  comp.data = NULL, comp.group = NULL, order = NULL, drop = FALSE,
  all.levels = FALSE, type = "lsm")

Arguments

input	Texts to be compared; a vector, document-term matrix (dtm; with terms as column names), or path to a file (.txt or .csv, with texts separated by one or more lines/rows).
comp	Defines the comparison to be made: If a function, this will be applied to input within each group (overall if there is no group; i.e., apply(input, 2, comp); e.g., comp = mean would compare each text to the mean profile of its group). If a character with a length of 1 and no spaces: If it partially matches one of lsm_profiles's rownames, that row will be used as the comparison. If it partially matches 'auto', the highest correlating lsm_profiles row will be used. If it partially matches 'pairwise', each text will be compared to one another. If it partially matches 'sequential', the last variable in group will be treated as a speaker ID (see the Grouping and Comparisons section). If a character vector, this will be processed in the same way as input. If a vector, either (a) logical or factor-like (having n levels < length) and of the same length as nrow(input), or (b) numeric or logical of length less than nrow(input), this will be used to select a subset of input (e.g., 1:10 would treat the first 10 rows of input as the comparison; lingmatch(text, type == 'prompt', data) would use the texts in the text column identified by the type column as the comparison). If a matrix-like object (having multiple rows and columns), or a named vector, this will be treated as a sort of dtm, assuming there are common (column) names between input and comp (e.g., if you had prompt and response texts that were already processed separately).
data	A matrix-like object as a reference for column names, if variables are referred to in other arguments (e.g., lingmatch(text, data = data) would be the same as lingmatch(data$text).
group	A logical or factor-like vector the same length as NROW(input), used to defined groups.
...	Passes arguments to lma_dtm, lma_weight, lma_termcat, and/or lma_lspace (depending on input and comp), and lma_simets.
comp.data	A matrix-like object as a source for comp variables.
comp.group	The column name of the grouping variable(s) in comp.data; if group contains references to column names, and comp.group is not specified, group variables will be looked for in comp.data.
order	A numeric vector the same length as nrow(input) indicating the order of the texts and grouping variables when the type of comparison is sequential. Only necessary if the texts are not already ordered as desired.
drop	logical; if TRUE, will drop columns with a sum of 0.
all.levels	logical; if FALSE, multiple groups are combined. See the Grouping and Comparisons section.
type	A character at least partially matching 'lsm' or 'lsa'; applies default settings aligning with the standard calculations of each type: LSM lingmatch(text, weight = 'freq', dict = lma_dict(1:9), metric = 'canberra') LSA lingmatch(text, weight = 'tfidf', space = '100k_lsa', metric = 'cosine')

Details

There are a great many points of decision in the assessment of linguistic similarity and/or accommodation, partly inherited from the great many point of decision inherent in the numerical representation of language. Two general types of matching are implemented here as sets of defaults: Language/Linguistic Style Matching (LSM; Niederhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002; Ireland & Pennebaker, 2010), and Latent Semantic Analysis/Similarity (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Babcock, Ta, & Ickes, 2014). See the type argument for specifics.

Value

A list with processed components of the input, information about the comparison, and results of the comparison:

• dtm: A sparse matrix; the raw count-dtm, or a version of the original input if it is more processed.

• processed: A matrix-like object; a processed version of the input (e.g., weighted and categorized).

• comp.type: A string describing the comparison if applicable.

• comp: A vector or matrix-like object; the comparison data if applicable.

• group: A string describing the group if applicable.

• sim: Result of lma_simets.

Grouping and Comparisons

Defining groups and comparisons can sometimes be a bit complicated, and requires dataset specific knowledge, so it can't always (readily) be done automatically. Variables entered in the group argument are treated differently depending on their position and other arguments:

Splitting

By default, groups are treated as if they define separate chunks of data in which comparisons should be calculated. Functions used to calculated comparisons, and pairwise comparisons are performed separately in each of these groups. For example, if you wanted to compare each text with the mean of all texts in its condition, a group variable could identify and split by condition. Given multiple grouping variables, calculations will either be done in each split (if all.levels = TRUE; applied in sequence so that groups become smaller and smaller), or once after all splits are made (if all.levels = FALSE). This makes for 'one to many' comparisons with either calculated or preexisting standards (i.e., the profile of the current data, or a precalculated profile, respectively).

Comparison ID

When comparison data is identified in comp, groups are assumed to apply to both input and comp (either both in data, or separately between data and comp.data, in which case comp.group may be needed if the same grouping variable have different names between data and comp.data). In this case, multiple grouping variables are combined into a single factor assumed to uniquely identify a comparison. This makes for 'one to many' comparisons with specific texts (as in the case of manipulated prompts or text-based conditions).

Speaker ID

If comp matches 'sequential', the last grouping variable entered is assumed to identify something like speakers (i.e., a factor with two or more levels and multiple observations per level). In this case, the data are assumed to be ordered (or ordered once sorted by order if specified). Any additional grouping variables before the last are treated as splitting groups. This can set up for probabilistic accommodation metrics. At the moment, when sequential comparisons are made within groups, similarity scores between speakers are averaged, resulting in mean matching between speakers within the group.

References

Babcock, M. J., Ta, V. P., & Ickes, W. (2014). Latent semantic similarity and language style matching in initial dyadic interactions. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33, 78-88.

Ireland, M. E., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). Language style matching in writing: synchrony in essays, correspondence, and poetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 549.

Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211.

Niederhoffer, K. G., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2002). Linguistic style matching in social interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21, 337-360.

See Also

For a general text processing function, see lma_process().

Examples

# compare single strings
lingmatch("Compare this sentence.", "With this other sentence.")

# compare each entry in a character vector with...
texts <- c(
  "One bit of text as an entry...",
  "Maybe multiple sentences in an entry. Maybe essays or posts or a book.",
  "Could be lines or a column from a read-in file..."
)

## one another
lingmatch(texts)

## the first
lingmatch(texts, 1)

## the next
lingmatch(texts, "seq")

## the set average
lingmatch(texts, mean)

## other entries in a group
lingmatch(texts, group = c("a", "a", "b"))

## one another, without stop words
lingmatch(texts, exclude = "function")

## a standard average (based on function words)
lingmatch(texts, "auto", dict = lma_dict(1:9))

lingmatch documentation built on May 29, 2024, 11:48 a.m.