Modeling Politeness in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Politeness is a linguistic phenomenon central to human communication. The many influences on the choice and interpretation of politeness in language make the phenomenon very complex to model and to account for in Human-Robot Interaction. I therefore question whether and how the implementation of such a social linguistic phenomenon in a robot is desirable. To find answers I conducted studies on politeness in Human-Robot Interaction from different perspectives: users' expectations, users' politeness towards a robot and users' perception of politeness use by a robot. In future research, based on and informed by my results, I aim to computationally model two politeness strategies and implement them in a Furhat robot.