Coordinating Chaos: A Structured Review of Linguistic Coordination Methodologies

Benjamin Roger Litterer, David Jurgens, Dallas Card


Abstract
Linguistic coordination—a phenomenon where conversation partners end up having similar patterns of language use—has been established across a variety of contexts and for multiple linguistic features. However, the study of language coordination has been accompanied by a diverse and inconsistently applied set of measures and theoretical perspectives. This diversity has significant consequences, as replication studies have highlighted the brittleness of certain measures and called influential findings into question. While prior work has addressed specific modeling decisions and model types, linguistic coordination research has yet to fully examine, synthesize, and critique the space of modeling choices available. In this work, we present a framework to organize the linguistic coordination literature. Using this schema, we provide a high-level overview of the choices involved in the measurement process and synthesize relevant critiques. Based on both gaps and limitations surfaced from this review, we suggest directions for further exploration and evaluation. In doing so, we provide the clarity required for linguistic coordination research to arrive at interpretable and sound conclusions.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1216
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24984–24999
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1216/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Roger Litterer, David Jurgens, and Dallas Card. 2025. Coordinating Chaos: A Structured Review of Linguistic Coordination Methodologies. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24984–24999, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coordinating Chaos: A Structured Review of Linguistic Coordination Methodologies (Litterer et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1216.pdf