Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing

Liye Fu, Susan Fussell, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil


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.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.416
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5127–5140
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.416
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.416
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liye Fu, Susan Fussell, and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. 2020. Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5127–5140, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing (Fu et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.416.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938661
Code
 CornellNLP/politeness-paraphrase
Data
WikiConv