  The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the
general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one
another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions
including choice of words, syntax, utterance length, pitch and gestures. In its
almost forty years of existence, this theory has been empirically supported
exclusively through small-scale or controlled laboratory studies. Here we
address this phenomenon in the context of Twitter conversations. Undoubtedly,
this setting is unlike any other in which accommodation was observed and, thus,
challenging to the theory. Its novelty comes not only from its size, but also
from the non real-time nature of conversations, from the 140 character length
restriction, from the wide variety of social relation types, and from a design
that was initially not geared towards conversation at all. Given such
constraints, it is not clear a priori whether accommodation is robust enough to
occur given the constraints of this new environment. To investigate this, we
develop a probabilistic framework that can model accommodation and measure its
effects. We apply it to a large Twitter conversational dataset specifically
developed for this task. This is the first time the hypothesis of linguistic
style accommodation has been examined (and verified) in a large scale, real
world setting. Furthermore, when investigating concepts such as stylistic
influence and symmetry of accommodation, we discover a complexity of the
phenomenon which was never observed before. We also explore the potential
relation between stylistic influence and network features commonly associated
with social status.
