Cultural Differences in Indirect Speech Act Use and Politeness in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

How do native English speakers and native Korean speakers politely make a request to a robot? Previous human-robot interaction studies on English have demonstrated that humans use indirect speech acts (ISAs) frequently to robots to make their requests polite. However, it is unknown whether humans considerably used ISAs to robots in other languages. In addition to ISAs, Korean has other politeness expressions called honorifics, which indicate different politeness from that of ISAs. This study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in humans' politeness expressions and politeness when they make requests to robots and to re-examine the effect of conventionality of context on the use of politeness expressions. We conducted a replication experiment of Williams et al. (2018) on native Korean speakers and analyzed their use of ISAs and honorifics. Our results showed that ISAs are rarely used in task-based human-robot interaction in Korean. Instead, honorifics are more frequently used than ISAs and are more common in conventionalized contexts than in unconventionalized contexts. These results suggest that the difference in politeness expressions and politeness between English and Korean exist in both human-robot interaction and human-human interaction. Furthermore, the conventionality of context has a strong constraint on making humans follow social norms in both languages.