A Computational Approach to Etiquette: Operationalizing Brown and Levinson's Politeness Model

A central source of cultural differences is the communication of politeness, which can powerfully affect perception and behavior. Our computational adaptation of a universal theory of human politeness (from Brown and Levinson, 1987) combines culture-specific aspects of social context to generate expectations, score, interpret and recommend polite and impolite behaviors. Tests show this approach could reduce software development costs and increase an intelligent agent's behavior repertoire through the incorporation of modular, cross-cultural etiquette libraries.