Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method for automatically generating fine-grained paraphrases to help speakers adapt their politeness levels to specific communication contexts, improving clarity and reducing misunderstandings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for suggesting paraphrases that align politeness with communication circumstances, addressing a gap in pragmatic language adaptation.

Findings

Method effectively reduces misalignment of politeness perceptions

Successful application in two realistic communication scenarios

Demonstrates feasibility of automatic politeness adjustment

Abstract

Aided by technology, people are increasingly able to communicate across geographical, cultural, and language barriers. This ability also results in new challenges, as interlocutors need to adapt their communication approaches to increasingly diverse circumstances. In this work, we take the first steps towards automatically assisting people in adjusting their language to a specific communication circumstance. As a case study, we focus on facilitating the accurate transmission of pragmatic intentions and introduce a methodology for suggesting paraphrases that achieve the intended level of politeness under a given communication circumstance. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by evaluating our method in two realistic communication scenarios and show that it can reduce the potential for misalignment between the speaker's intentions and the listener's perceptions in both cases.