Investigating politeness strategies in chatbots through the lens of Conversation Analysis
Resumo
Despite gaining popularity in recent years, chatbots frequently fall short of meeting user expectations. These interaction challenges arise from the limitations of chatbots, including their capacity to accurately understand user queries, deliver appropriate responses, and engage in natural conversation. Previous studies have investigated the effective employment of various linguistic strategies in conversational interfaces, particularly focusing on the use of politeness, to significantly enhance user perception and overall experience. This study focuses on exploring the variation of politeness in conversational design, specifically analyzing the role of indirectness in human-chatbot mockup dialogues created by Brazilian teenage students in a workshop. The analysis considers conversational features such as tone, structure, and intent to identify the conversational profiles associated with different politeness strategies. The findings reveal distinct conversational profiles and a prevalence of indirectness during the opening phase of conversations. Additionally, the study extends the analysis to electronic government chatbots from different countries, showing similar strategies. The study contributes by introducing analytical categories, identifying culturally-grounded politeness strategies, and proposing a visualization approach for analyzing conversational data. This research provides valuable insights and methodologies for designing culturally-informed politeness in chatbots, advancing the field of conversational design, and enhancing user experiences.
Palavras-chave:
culture, chatbot, politeness, indirectness, conversation analysis
Referências
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Gabriely Batista, Mateus Monteiro, and Luciana Salgado. 2022. Investigando chatbots governamentais: um panorama sobre a usabilidade dentro e fora do Brasil. In Anais do X Workshop de Computação Aplicada em Governo Eletrônico (Niterói). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 73–84. DOI: 10.5753/wcge.2022.223318
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Ana Paula Chaves, Eck Doerry, Jesse Egbert, and Marco Gerosa. 2019. It’s how you say it: Identifying appropriate register for chatbot language design. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction. 102–109.
Ana Paula Chaves, Jesse Egbert, Toby Hocking, Eck Doerry, and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2022. Chatbots language design: The influence of language variation on user experience with tourist assistant chatbots. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 29, 2 (2022), 1–38.
Ana Paula Chaves and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2020. How Should My Chatbot Interact? A Survey on Social Characteristics in Human–Chatbot Interaction Design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (2020), 1–30.
David Crystal. 2011. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. John Wiley & Sons.
Anna Dall’Acqua and Fabio Tamburini. 2021. Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design. IJCoL. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics 7, 7-1, 2 (2021), 191–222.
Andreea Danielescu and Gwen Christian. 2018. A bot is not a polyglot: Designing personalities for multi-lingual conversational agents. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–9.
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Mateus de Souza Monteiro and Luciana Cardoso de Castro Salgado. 2023. Conversational agents: a survey on culturally informed design practices. Journal on Interactive Systems 14, 1 (2023), 33–46.
Asbjørn Følstad, Theo Araujo, Effie Lai-Chong Law, Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Symeon Papadopoulos, Lea Reis, Marcos Baez, Guy Laban, Patrick McAllister, Carolin Ischen, 2021. Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda. Computing 103, 12 (2021), 2915–2942.
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Michael Haugh. 2015. Im/politeness implicatures. de Gruyter.
Geert Hofstede. 2001. Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. sage.
Laurence Horn and Gergory Ward. 2008. The handbook of pragmatics. John Wiley & Sons.
Yaxin Hu, Yuxiao Qu, Adam Maus, and Bilge Mutlu. 2022. Polite or Direct? Conversation Design of a Smart Display for Older Adults Based on Politeness Theory. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–15.
Roman Jakobson. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Style in language. MA: MIT Press, 350–377.
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Andrea Lamont-Mills and Steven Christensen. 2018. Conversation Analysis and Research with Children. Oxford University Press.
Paul Luff, Nigel G Gilbert, and David Frohlich. 1990. Computers and conversation. Academic Press.
Birgit Lugrin, Benjamin Eckstein, Kirsten Bergmann, and Corinna Heindl. 2018. Adapted foreigner-directed communication towards virtual agents. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. 59–64.
Luiz Antônio Marcuschi. 1991. Análise da conversação. Ed. Ática.
Mateus Monteiro, Leonardo Vasconcelos, José Viterbo, Luciana Salgado, and Flávia Bernardini. 2021. Assessing the quality of local e-government service through citizen-sourcing applications. In 2021 IEEE 24th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). IEEE, 1178–1183.
Mateus de Souza Monteiro, Gabriely Oliveira da Silva Batista, and Luciana Cardoso de Castro Salgado. 2023. Investigating usability pitfalls in Brazilian and Foreign governmental chatbots. Journal on Interactive Systems 14, 1 (Jul. 2023), 331–340. DOI: 10.5753/jis.2023.3104
Robert J Moore and Raphael Arar. 2019. Conversational UX design: A practitioner’s guide to the natural conversation framework. Morgan & Claypool.
Mordor. 2023. Global chatbot market - growth, trends, covid-19 impact, and forecasts (2023 - 2028). Mordor Intelligence. [link].
Ha Nguyen. 2022. Examining Teenagers’ Perceptions of Conversational Agents in Learning Settings. In Interaction Design and Children. 374–381.
David Obremski, Jean-Luc Lugrin, Philipp Schaper, and Birgit Lugrin. 2021. Non-native speaker perception of Intelligent Virtual Agents in two languages: the impact of amount and type of grammatical mistakes. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 15, 2 (2021), 229–238.
Kanishk Rana, Rahul Madaan, and Jainendra Shukla. 2021. Effect of polite triggers in chatbot conversations on user experience across gender, age, and personality. In 2021 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). IEEE, 813–819.
Luciana Salgado, Meirylene Avelino, Iris Herdy, Amara Santoyani, and Mateus Monteiro. 2023. Aproximando Meninas da Computação: Lições Aprendidas em Oficinas de Secbots. In Anais do XVII Women in Information Technology (João Pessoa/PB). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 376–381. DOI: 10.5753/wit.2023.230528
Luciana Salgado, Roberto Pereira, and Isabela Gasparini. 2015. Cultural issues in HCI: challenges and opportunities. In Human-Computer Interaction: Design and Evaluation: 17th International Conference, HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015, Proceedings, Part I 17. Springer, 60–70.
Emanuel A Schegloff and Harvey Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings. (1973).
John R Searle. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press.
Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell. 2007. Chatbots: are they really useful?. In Ldv forum, Vol. 22. 29–49.
Satwinder Singh and Himanshu Beniwal. 2022. A survey on near-human conversational agents. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences 34, 10 (2022), 8852–8866.
Bruce M Tharp. 2009. Defining “culture” and “organizational culture”: From anthropology to the office. Interpretation a Journal of Bible and Theology 2, 3 (2009), 1–5.
Edward Burnett Tylor. 1871. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art and custom. Vol. 2. J. Murray.
Shuo Zhou, Zhe Zhang, and Timothy Bickmore. 2017. Adapting a persuasive conversational agent for the Chinese culture. In 2017 international conference on culture and computing (culture and computing). IEEE, 89–96.
Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa, Gabriel Diniz Junqueira Barbosa, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, and Carla Faria Leitão. 2021. A semiotics-based epistemic tool to reason about ethical issues in digital technology design and development. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 363–374.
Gabriely Batista, Mateus Monteiro, and Luciana Salgado. 2022. Investigando chatbots governamentais: um panorama sobre a usabilidade dentro e fora do Brasil. In Anais do X Workshop de Computação Aplicada em Governo Eletrônico (Niterói). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 73–84. DOI: 10.5753/wcge.2022.223318
Penelope Brown and Stephen C Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction. Cambridge University Press, 56–311.
Stephanie Carnell and Benjamin Lok. 2018. The effects of author identity on dialogue for virtual human communication skills training. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. 65–70.
Ana Paula Chaves, Eck Doerry, Jesse Egbert, and Marco Gerosa. 2019. It’s how you say it: Identifying appropriate register for chatbot language design. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction. 102–109.
Ana Paula Chaves, Jesse Egbert, Toby Hocking, Eck Doerry, and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2022. Chatbots language design: The influence of language variation on user experience with tourist assistant chatbots. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 29, 2 (2022), 1–38.
Ana Paula Chaves and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2020. How Should My Chatbot Interact? A Survey on Social Characteristics in Human–Chatbot Interaction Design. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (2020), 1–30.
David Crystal. 2011. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. John Wiley & Sons.
Anna Dall’Acqua and Fabio Tamburini. 2021. Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design. IJCoL. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics 7, 7-1, 2 (2021), 191–222.
Andreea Danielescu and Gwen Christian. 2018. A bot is not a polyglot: Designing personalities for multi-lingual conversational agents. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–9.
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza and Carla Faria Leitão. 2009. Semiotic Engineering Methods for Scientific Research in HCI. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics 2, 1 (Jan. 2009), 1–122. DOI: 10.2200/s00173ed1v01y200901hci002
Mateus de Souza Monteiro and Luciana Cardoso de Castro Salgado. 2023. Conversational agents: a survey on culturally informed design practices. Journal on Interactive Systems 14, 1 (2023), 33–46.
Asbjørn Følstad, Theo Araujo, Effie Lai-Chong Law, Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Symeon Papadopoulos, Lea Reis, Marcos Baez, Guy Laban, Patrick McAllister, Carolin Ischen, 2021. Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda. Computing 103, 12 (2021), 2915–2942.
Clifford Geertz. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. Vol. 5043. Basic books.
Michael Haugh. 2015. Im/politeness implicatures. de Gruyter.
Geert Hofstede. 2001. Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. sage.
Laurence Horn and Gergory Ward. 2008. The handbook of pragmatics. John Wiley & Sons.
Yaxin Hu, Yuxiao Qu, Adam Maus, and Bilge Mutlu. 2022. Polite or Direct? Conversation Design of a Smart Display for Older Adults Based on Politeness Theory. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–15.
Roman Jakobson. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Style in language. MA: MIT Press, 350–377.
Roger M Keesing. 1974. Theories of culture. Annual review of anthropology 3, 1 (1974), 73–97.
Andrea Lamont-Mills and Steven Christensen. 2018. Conversation Analysis and Research with Children. Oxford University Press.
Paul Luff, Nigel G Gilbert, and David Frohlich. 1990. Computers and conversation. Academic Press.
Birgit Lugrin, Benjamin Eckstein, Kirsten Bergmann, and Corinna Heindl. 2018. Adapted foreigner-directed communication towards virtual agents. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. 59–64.
Luiz Antônio Marcuschi. 1991. Análise da conversação. Ed. Ática.
Mateus Monteiro, Leonardo Vasconcelos, José Viterbo, Luciana Salgado, and Flávia Bernardini. 2021. Assessing the quality of local e-government service through citizen-sourcing applications. In 2021 IEEE 24th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). IEEE, 1178–1183.
Mateus de Souza Monteiro, Gabriely Oliveira da Silva Batista, and Luciana Cardoso de Castro Salgado. 2023. Investigating usability pitfalls in Brazilian and Foreign governmental chatbots. Journal on Interactive Systems 14, 1 (Jul. 2023), 331–340. DOI: 10.5753/jis.2023.3104
Robert J Moore and Raphael Arar. 2019. Conversational UX design: A practitioner’s guide to the natural conversation framework. Morgan & Claypool.
Mordor. 2023. Global chatbot market - growth, trends, covid-19 impact, and forecasts (2023 - 2028). Mordor Intelligence. [link].
Ha Nguyen. 2022. Examining Teenagers’ Perceptions of Conversational Agents in Learning Settings. In Interaction Design and Children. 374–381.
David Obremski, Jean-Luc Lugrin, Philipp Schaper, and Birgit Lugrin. 2021. Non-native speaker perception of Intelligent Virtual Agents in two languages: the impact of amount and type of grammatical mistakes. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 15, 2 (2021), 229–238.
Kanishk Rana, Rahul Madaan, and Jainendra Shukla. 2021. Effect of polite triggers in chatbot conversations on user experience across gender, age, and personality. In 2021 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). IEEE, 813–819.
Luciana Salgado, Meirylene Avelino, Iris Herdy, Amara Santoyani, and Mateus Monteiro. 2023. Aproximando Meninas da Computação: Lições Aprendidas em Oficinas de Secbots. In Anais do XVII Women in Information Technology (João Pessoa/PB). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 376–381. DOI: 10.5753/wit.2023.230528
Luciana Salgado, Roberto Pereira, and Isabela Gasparini. 2015. Cultural issues in HCI: challenges and opportunities. In Human-Computer Interaction: Design and Evaluation: 17th International Conference, HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015, Proceedings, Part I 17. Springer, 60–70.
Emanuel A Schegloff and Harvey Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings. (1973).
John R Searle. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press.
Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell. 2007. Chatbots: are they really useful?. In Ldv forum, Vol. 22. 29–49.
Satwinder Singh and Himanshu Beniwal. 2022. A survey on near-human conversational agents. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences 34, 10 (2022), 8852–8866.
Bruce M Tharp. 2009. Defining “culture” and “organizational culture”: From anthropology to the office. Interpretation a Journal of Bible and Theology 2, 3 (2009), 1–5.
Edward Burnett Tylor. 1871. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art and custom. Vol. 2. J. Murray.
Shuo Zhou, Zhe Zhang, and Timothy Bickmore. 2017. Adapting a persuasive conversational agent for the Chinese culture. In 2017 international conference on culture and computing (culture and computing). IEEE, 89–96.
Publicado
16/10/2023
Como Citar
MONTEIRO, Mateus de Souza; PEREIRA, Vinícius Carvalho; SALGADO, Luciana Cardoso de Castro.
Investigating politeness strategies in chatbots through the lens of Conversation Analysis. In: SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO SOBRE FATORES HUMANOS EM SISTEMAS COMPUTACIONAIS (IHC), 22. , 2023, Maceió/AL.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2023
.
