Generating Politeness in Task Based Interaction: An Evaluation of the Effect of Linguistic Form and Culture

Politeness is an integral part of human language variation, 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 have some water please?" This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a natural language generator with an AI Planner to model Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (BL (2) our indirect strategies which should be the politest forms, are seen as the rudest; and (3) English and Indian native speakers of English have different perceptions of the level of politeness needed to mitigate particular face threats.