AI to Increase Politeness in Writing

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute are using artificial intelligence to make writing sound more polite. Their work goes beyond previous AI attempts to mark tone in written communications by replacing impolite sentences with more polite language, and the results are sentences that sound natural.

This table compares other computer results with those of this team. In the third column, we see more polite revisions of the first column.

Politeness.PNG

For the second example, the authors argue that using first-person plural we “creates the sense that the burden of the request is shared between speaker and addressee.”

Image source.

Discussion:

  • What’s your reaction to this work? How helpful would you find this program?

  • What’s your view of the revised sentences in column three: natural and better, stilted and insincere, or something else?

  • Why aren’t people more polite in their writing. In other words, why do we need this program—or do we?