Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing

What it is about

The paper proposes rephrasing a message so that the receiver perceives the politeness the sender intended, even when the channel loses some cues (machine translation drops please, and could you collapses into can you) or when the receiver reads cues differently. Politeness is modelled as a sum of 18 local strategies (gratitude, apology, please, subjunctive could/would you, indicative can/will you, hedges, greeting, «by the way», «for me / for you», swearing, conjunction start, filler, reassurance…), each with a linear weight learned from the Stanford Politeness Corpus ratings. A planning step chooses, by integer linear programming, the set of channel-safe strategies whose summed perceived score is closest to the sender's intended score. A delete-and-generate step then removes the dropped markers and inserts the planned ones with a neural generator. Both settings (an English→Chinese MT channel; pairs of annotators with different perception weights) show a smaller gap between intended and perceived politeness than doing nothing or greedy one-for-one replacement.

Ideas

• I1. The plan step needs no neural model and fits Mova's dialogue layer. world/src/talk.rs already has 20 integer-weighted politeness detectors. Add a planner that, given a target score and a set of allowed strategies, finds the subset of strategies closest to the target. With at most ~20 binary strategies and a cap of three additions, exhaustive search in fixed order with lowest-index tie-break is exact and deterministic, and the chosen set with its weights is the explanation.
• I2. Realisation can stay template-based. Each strategy has a fixed insertion slot in the reply (gratitude at the end, «please» before the verb, subjunctive «could you» replacing the imperative). Test that the detectors in talk.rs re-detect exactly the planned set on the generated reply: a round-trip test that can go red.
• I3. Per-listener weights are the paper's "misaligned perception" case. If Mova's family members get different politeness weights (stricter or looser), the same planner adapts the reply to the addressee. Record this as an option in chapter 32 §11 rather than build it now.

For Mova

32. Politeness and hedging §6 (computational politeness) and §11; world/src/talk.rs (politeness detectors and replies); measures: round-trip test (planned set = re-detected set), and score gap |target − detected score| over a list of test requests.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.416 · arXiv 2012.00012

@inproceedings{fu2020facilitating,
  title = {{Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing}},
  author = {Fu, Liye and Fussell, Susan and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.416},
  eprint = {2012.00012},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.416}
}

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