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.