In this chapter, two empirical pilot studies on the role of politeness in dialogue summarization are described. In these studies, a collection of four dialogues was used. Each dialogue was automatically generated by the NECA system and the politeness of the dialogue participants was systematically manipulated. Subjects were divided into groups who had to summarize the dialogues from a particula...

We present a demo of our conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of polite...

While most dialogue systems restrict themselves to the adjustment of the propositional contents, our work concentrates on the generation of stylistic variations in order to improve the user’s perception of the interaction. To accomplish this goal, our approach integrates a social theory of politeness with a cognitive theory of emotions. We propose a hierarchical selection process for politeness...

We report on chunk tagging methods for German that recognize complex non-verbal phrases using structural chunk tags with Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This state-of-the-art method for sequence classification achieves 93.5% accuracy on newspaper text. For the same task, a classical trigram tagger approach based on Hidden Markov Models reaches a baseline of 88.1%. CRFs allow for a clean and p...

In two experiments, children's use and understanding of polite forms and the relationship these abilities share with an ability to adopt the perspective of another were examined. Development in the understanding of polite forms seemed best characterized as sensitivity to the function of these forms in an increasing number of sentence types. Development in the use of polite forms could be viewed...

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 ...

This paper presents a method for the assignment of grammatical relation labels in a sentence structure. The method has been implemented in the software tool AGRA (Automatic Grammatical Relation Assigner), which is part of a project for the development of a treebank of Italian sentences, and a knowledge base of Italian subcategorization frames. The annotation schema implements a notion of unders...