We developed a cooperative time-sensitive task to study vocal expression of politeness and efficiency. Sixteen dyads completed 20 trials of the ‘Maze Task’, where one participant (the ‘navigator’) gave oral instructions (mainly ‘up’, ‘down’, left’, ‘right’) for the other (the ‘pilot’) to follow. For half of the trials, navigators were instructed to be polite, and for the other half to be effici...

In order to build embodied conversational agents that are able to communicate with the user in a more natural manner, the consideration of social aspects seems inevitable. One aspect of social interaction is the use of politeness strategies. In this paper, we report on a corpus study we conducted in order to shed light on the co-occurrence of gestures and verbal politeness strategies in face th...

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Patterns of Politeness in Teacher-Student Interaction: Investigating an Academic Context AbstractThis study investigated politeness strategies used in instructor-student relationships, in an academic environment. To conduct the study, four university classes with different instructors were randomly selected, observed and analyzed. Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness was drawn on as the an...

“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-...

We apply of Game Theory to linguistic politeness, considering requests as the canonical speech act where polite expressions factor in. As making a request is necessarily both strategic and asymmetric, we adapt Trust Games, modifying them by the notions of reputation, face, and repetition. Given this framework, our results show that although some polite requests may not be rational under one-sho...

Automatic classification of dialogues between clients and a service center needs a preliminary dialogue parameterization. Such a parameterization is usually faced with essential difficulties when we deal with politeness, competence, satisfaction, and other similar characteristics of clients. In the paper, we show how to avoid these difficulties using empirical formulae based on lexical-grammati...