Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing

Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5127–5140, November 16–20, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 5127 Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing Liye Fu Cornell University liye@cs.cornell.edu Susan R. Fussell Cornell University sfussell@cornell.edu Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil Cornell University cristian@cs.cornell.edu Abstract Aided by technology, people are increasingly able to communicate across geographical, cul- tural, and language barriers. This ability also results in new challenges, as interlocutors need to adapt their communication approaches to in- creasingly diverse circumstances. In this work, we take the first steps towards automatically as- sisting 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 cir- cumstance. 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 misalign- ment between the speaker’s intentions and the listener’s perceptions in both cases. 1 Introduction Technological developments have greatly enhanced our communication experience, providing the op- portunity to overcome geographic, cultural and lan- guage barriers to interact with people from differ- ent backgrounds in diverse settings (Herring, 1996). However, this opportunity brings additional chal- lenges for the interlocutors, as they need to adjust their language to increasingly diverse communica- tion circumstances. As humans, we often make conscious attempts to account for the communication setting. For instance, we may simplify our expressions if we know our listener has relatively limited language proficiency, and we tend to be more polite to- wards people with higher status. However, manag- ing these stylistic adjustments can be cognitively taxing, especially when we are missing relevant information—e.g., the language proficiency or the status of a conversational partner we meet online. Figure 1: Berlo’s Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver model suggests that the intended and perceived style of a message can be misaligned if: A. the channel does not faithfully transmit the message, or B. the receiver has a different reading of the message compared to the sender. Examples are inspired by Miller et al. (2016). If we do not adjust our language, we risk not properly conveying our pragmatic inten- tions (Thomas, 1983). In particular, Berlo’s Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver model (Berlo, 1960) points to two potential circumstance-specific causes for misalignments between intentions and perceptions (Figure 1). In this work we explore a method for assisting speakers to avoid such mis- alignments by suggesting for each message a para- phrase that is more likely to convey the original pragmatic intention when communicated in a given circumstance, as determined by the properties of the sender, channel, and receiver. As a case study, in this work, we focus on one particular pragmatic aspect: politeness. It is important to assist people to accurately transmit their intended politeness, as this interpersonal style (Biber, 1988) plays a key role in social interac- tions (Burke and Kraut, 2008; Murphy, 2014; Hu et al., 2019; …

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