ConversationAlign: Open-Source Software for Analyzing Patterns of Lexical Use and Alignment in Conversation Transcripts

Much of our understanding of language processing has been informed by controlled laboratory experiments abstracted from the real world demands of naturalistic communication. Interactive language use “in the wild” involves synchronizing numerous verbal and non-verbal behaviors between interlocutors. Conversation partners synchronize verbal production through modulations of rate, amplitude, lexical-semantic complexity, affective tone, and many other dimensions. Much remains to be learned about how to measure linguistic alignment in naturalistic interactions. We developed an open-source R package (ConversationAlign) capable of computing novel indices of alignment and main effects of language use between interlocutors across 30 psycholinguistic dimensions (e.g., valence, concreteness, frequency, word length). We describe operations of the ConversationAlign workflow, including its primary functions of cleaning transcripts and transforming raw language data to simultaneous time series objects aggregated by interlocutor, turn, and conversation. We present a use case of ConversationAlign applied to interview transcripts between American radio legend, Terry Gross, and her many guests over the span of 15 years (Fresh Air Archive, 2001). We identify caveats for use and potential sources of bias (e.g., polysemy, missing data, robustness to brief language samples). We close with a discussion of potential applications to better understand lexical alignment. ConversationAlign is freely available for download and use via GitHub at https://github.com/Reilly-ConceptsCognitionLab/ConversationAlign