Politeness and Variation in Synthetic Social Interaction

“Get lost!” or “I think you should leave now” or “Ok, perhaps I’ll see you around some other time”, humans seem to be expressing things differently in different situations based on various factors: Social relationship between the two people, urgency of an action, their personality, etc. Social interaction of synthetic agents appears believable when it has at least some characteristics of human-human conversation. In this paper, two important characteristics: Politeness and Variation are discussed. A language generation plug-in has been created that produces conversations with different strengths of politeness and variation. The computational implementation and how it modifies the language of a conversational agent is described along with some examples.