The Effect of Differences in Linguistic Behavior by Conversational Agents Based on Politeness Strategies for Development Relationship with Humans – Psychological Effects of Joke at the First Meeting –

Abstract

In recent years, for the development of agents capable of communicating as partner of humans, research of to realize a more natural conversation between humans and agents is drawing attention. On the other hand, few researches attempt to systematize the effect of agent’s linguistic behavior on the impression and relationship building. Humans are selects linguistic consideration in conversation taking psychological distance and social position into consideration in order to build good relationships with opponents. Based on the idea of Reeves’s media equation and Dennett’s intentional stance, it seems that there is effective linguistic consideration for relationship building also in human-agent conversation. There, in this research, we aim to verify the effect of agent’s linguistic behavior on the impression and relationship building. As an approach, based on the politeness theory, we subjectively evaluate the impression when the agent used jokes that can be expected to have an effect to attribute intention to users among the consideration to actively reduce the distance to the opponent (Positive politeness strategy), and consideration for keeping it (Negative politeness strategy), by participant experiments.