Politeness Strategies
High-Level Intuition
A collection of conversational markers that indicates the use of politeness.
Citation
Implementation Basics
The PolitenessStrategies framework in Convokit identifies linguistic aspects of politeness using an annotated corpus of requests. It evaluates and operationalizes politeness theory components like indirection and deference, with a classifier achieving near-human performance across domains.
Each utterance (message) and a Spacy object (to do the parsing) is parsed through the transform_utterance() method of a PolitenessStrategies instance. This method “Extract politeness strategies for raw string inputs (or individual utterances).” It calculates the following politeness strategies:
please please_start hashedge indirect_btw hedges factuality deference gratitude apologizing 1st_person_pl 1st_person 1st_person_start 2nd_person 2nd_person_start indirect_greeting direct_question direct_start haspositive hasnegative subjunctive indicative
Implementation Notes/Caveats
NA
Interpreting the Feature
List of politeness features returned by function (From cited papers):
No. |
Strategy (Positive = More Polite) |
Politeness Score |
In top quartile |
Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Gratitude |
0.87*** |
78%*** |
I really appreciate that you’ve done them. |
|
Deference |
0.78*** |
70%*** |
Nice work so far on your rewrite. |
|
Greeting |
0.43*** |
45%*** |
Hey, I just tried to … |
|
Positive lexicon |
0.12*** |
32%*** |
Wow! / This is a great way to deal… |
|
Negative lexicon |
-0.13*** |
22%** |
If you’re going to accuse me … |
|
Apologizing |
0.36*** |
53%*** |
Sorry to bother you … |
|
Please |
0.49*** |
57%*** |
Could you please say more… |
|
Please start |
−0.30* |
22% |
Please do not remove warnings … |
|
Indirect (btw) |
0.63*** |
58%** |
By the way, where did you find … |
|
Direct question |
−0.27*** |
15%*** |
What is your native language? |
|
Direct start |
−0.43*** |
9%*** |
So can you retrieve it or not? |
|
Counterfactual modal |
0.47*** |
52%*** |
Could/Would you … |
|
Indicative modal |
0.09 |
27% |
Can/Will you … |
|
1st person start |
0.12*** |
29%** |
I have just put the article … |
|
1st person pl. |
0.08* |
27% |
Could we find a less complex name … |
|
1st person |
0.08*** |
28%*** |
It is my view that … |
|
2nd person |
0.05*** |
30%*** |
But what’s the good source you have in mind? |
|
2nd person start |
−0.30*** |
17%** |
You’ve reverted yourself … |
|
Hedges |
0.14*** |
28% |
I suggest we start with … |
|
Factuality |
−0.38*** |
13%*** |
In fact you did link, … |