Generating politeness in task based interaction: an evaluation of the effect of linguistic form and culture

  • Authors:

  • Swati Gupta;Marilyn A. Walker;Daniela M. Romano

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield, UK;University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield, UK;University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield, UK

  • Venue:
  • ENLG '07 Proceedings of the Eleventh European Workshop on Natural Language Generation
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Politeness is an integral part of human language variation, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either "Get me a glass of water mate!" or "I wonder if I could possibly have some water please?" This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a natural language generator with an AI Planner to model Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (B&L) in collaborative task-oriented dialogue, with the ultimate goal of providing a fun and stimulating environment for learning English as a second language. An evaluation of politeness perceptions of POLLy's output shows that: (1) perceptions are generally consistent with B&L's predictions for choice of form and for discourse situation, i.e. utterances to strangers need to be much more polite than those to friends; (2) our indirect strategies which should be the politest forms, are seen as the rudest; and (3) English and Indian native speakers of English have different perceptions of the level of politeness needed to mitigate particular face threats.