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Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexical coordination or entrainment in literature, only a few have explored coordination in syntactic or semantic space. In this work, we attempt to combine these different aspects of coordination into a single measure by leveraging distances in a neural word representation space. In particular, we adopt the recently proposed Word Mover's Distance with word2vec embeddings and extend it to measure the dissimilarity in language used in multiple consecutive speaker turns. To validate our approach, we apply this measure for two case studies in the clinical psychology domain. We find that our proposed measure is correlated with the therapist's empathy towards their patient in Motivational Interviewing and with affective behaviors in Couples Therapy. In both case studies, our proposed metric exhibits higher correlation than previously proposed measures.When applied to the couples with relationship improvement, we also notice a significant decrease in the proposed measure over the course of therapy, indicating higher linguistic coordination.

In this paper, we analyze a 53-hour speech corpus of interactions of soldiers who had recently attempted suicide or had strong suicidal ideation conversing with their therapists. In particular, we study the complexity in therapist-patient speech as a marker of their emotional bond. Emotional bond is the extent to which the patient feels understood by and connected to the therapist. First, we extract speech features from audio recordings of their interactions. Then, we consider the nonlinear time series representation of those features and compute complexity measures based on the Lyapunov coefficient and correlation dimension. For the majority of the subjects, we observe that speech complexity in therapist-patient pairs is higher for the interview sessions, when compared to that of the rest of their interactions (intervention and post-interview follow-up). This indicates that entrainment (adapting to each other's speech) between the patient and the therapist is lower during the interview than regular interactions. This observation is consistent with prior studies in clinical psychology, considering that assessment interviews typically involve the therapist asking routine questions to enquire about the patient's suicidal thoughts and feelings. In addition, we find that complexity is negatively correlated with the patient's perceived emotional bond with the therapist.