Many languages use honorifics to express politeness, social distance, or the relative social status between the speaker and their addressee(s). In machine translation from a language without honorifics such as English, it is difficult to predict the appropriate honorific, but users may want to control the level of politeness in the output. In this paper, we perform a pilot study to control hono...

Although there has been extensive research on children's moral knowledge about lying and truth-telling and their actual lie- or truth-telling behaviors, research to examine the relation between these two is extremely rare. This study examined one hundred and twenty 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds' moral understanding of lies and their actual lying behaviors in a politeness situation. Results revealed ...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the contribution of prosody to discourse analysis in interaction by means of a concrete example, i.e., the analysis of bonjour, a French greeting. In this experiment, naïve subjects were made to listen to a series of French politeness formulae taken from real interactions and asked to evaluate the degree of politeness they perceived. Two hypotheses were ...

In this paper, we contend that interpersonal circumplex theories and politeness strategies may be combined to inform the generation of social behaviours for virtual agents. We show how stances from the interpersonal circumplex correspond to certain politeness strategies and present the results of a small pilot study that partially supports our approach. Our goal is to implement this model in a ...

In this study, we investigate politeness and frustration behavior of children during their spoken interaction with computer characters in a game. We focus on automatically detecting frustrated, polite and neutral attitudes from the child’s speech (acoustic and language) communication cues and study their differences as a function of age and gender. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog co...

This paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness which is addressed is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) which is triggered by an im/politeness mismatch. In the first phase of the study, two se...

The use of polite agents is a new approach in order to improve efficiency and naturalism in navigation for PCs in crowded virtual worlds. This paper aims to model the politeness of virtual humans using logic based approaches, subject to theory of politeness decomposed of conventional and interpersonal politeness. To do so, we propose a high level agent architecture combined with normative frame...

In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, every speech act is potentially face-threatening to an aspect of the hearer’s or the speaker’s face. Though imminent, face-threat is present in varying degrees, represented as the seriousness or weightiness (W) of FTAx. Interlocutors calculate this using the formula Wx 1⁄4 D(S;H)þ P(H;S)þ Rx, where D(S,H) represents the social distance between interloc...