Recent research on conversational agents emphasises the need to build affective conversational systems with social intelligence. Politeness is an integral part of socially appropriate and affective conversational behaviour, 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 ha...

Identity implications theory (IIT) is applied to analyze how young adults manage identity concerns associated with the goals of initiating, intensifying, and disengaging from romantic relationships. Participants wrote their responses to one of six hypothetical romantic (re)definition scenarios, indicated whether they actually would pursue the relational goal if their scenario were real, and rat...

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...

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of o...

Politeness issues in virtual commercial contexts received rare attention from both practitioners and researchers. This work developed an instrument for gauging degree of politeness in online retailers’ storefronts. The instrument’s reliability and validity were confirmed through empirical data analysis. A second-order confirmatory factor analysis revealed that online consumers' tendency in payi...

This paper describes a 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 politen...

This essay examines greetings as one of the elements of politeness in a Nigerian community and how it influences the cultural characteristics of the people. To analyze, this essay makes use of speech act theory and politeness principle and also considers the pragmatic context in analyzing different types of greetings such as condolences, departure and arrival, rejoicing, daily greetings, casual...