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    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Taking Things at Face Value: How Stance Informs Politeness of Virtual Agents</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Jeroen Linssen</string-name>
          <email>j.m.linssen@utwente.nl</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Mari¨et Theune</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Dirk Heylen</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Human Media Interaction, University of Twente P.</institution>
          <addr-line>O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NL">The Netherlands</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>71</fpage>
      <lpage>82</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>In this paper, we contend that interpersonal circumplex theories and politeness strategies may be combined to inform the generation of social behaviours for virtual agents. We show how stances from the interpersonal circumplex correspond to certain politeness strategies and present the results of a small pilot study that partially supports our approach. Our goal is to implement this model in a serious game for police training.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        Introduction
The automatic generation of social behaviour has been characterized as a
‘crucial need’ for artificial agents, robots and other intelligent interfaces capable of
human-like interaction [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. In this paper, we focus on social interaction within
the field of law enforcement. To assist in the training curriculum of the Dutch
police, we are developing a serious game in which police o cers will interact with
virtual agents to improve their social awareness. How police o cers approach
and try to reason with civilians and o↵ enders can determine how certain
situations are resolved. The Dutch police strive to enforce the law by dealing with
conflicts in a de-escalating way. That is, whenever they approach and try to
reason with civilians, their goal is to defuse the situation non-aggressively. Being
aware of the other’s as well as of their own social behaviour is of importance
for police o cers during such interactions. Therefore, the curriculum of police
trainees includes social awareness training. However, these trainings are mainly
theoretical, with only few practical training sessions in the form of interaction
with actors. Moreover, only a few police o cers in training are able to participate
in these sessions due to both monetary and time costs—the remaining trainees
are restricted to being an audience.
      </p>
      <p>We take on the view that the behaviour of the agents in our serious game
should be informed by theories about social interaction that relate to
interpersonal attitudes or stances. The current training curriculum of police trainees
already includes stance theory. We argue that stances are closely related to
politeness, and propose a mapping of stances to specific combinations of politeness
(or impoliteness) strategies.</p>
      <p>This paper presents the basis of this approach. First we discuss some related
work in section 2. Two theories about stance and politeness are explained in
section 3. In section 4, we discuss the relation between stance and politeness and
show how social behaviour can be informed by the combination of the two. We
describe a small user experiment carried out to evaluate our model in section 5
and end with conclusions in section 6.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <p>
        Past work on social interaction with or between virtual agents has focused on
emotions rather than stance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref12">1, 12</xref>
        ]. While emotions certainly influence people’s
behaviour, our approach focuses on people’s attitudes toward each other, based
on the interpersonal circumplex theory (see section 3.2). Another serious game
implementing this theory for human-virtual-agent communication is
deLearyous [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. This game focuses on training interpersonal communication skills in a
working environment setting, letting users interact with virtual agents through
written natural language input. One of the findings of this project was that
determining the stance of dialogue utterances is a very di cult task, even for
human annotators.
      </p>
      <p>
        In our work, we focus on generating utterances that appropriately express the
agent’s stance. To this end, we combine interpersonal circumplex theories with
Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] (see section 3.1). Walker et al.
presented one of the first designs for politeness in virtual agents based on these
strategies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. Their work revolved around using social and a↵ ective character
traits to inform linguistic style. Gupta et al. continued this work by implementing
Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies in POLLy, a system which features
a collaborative task-oriented dialogue [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. They showed that users’ perception of
the level of politeness of the strategies was largely consistent with Brown and
Levinson’s theory. Porayska-Pomsta and Mellish implemented a virtual tutor
which relies on case-based reasoning to determine which politeness strategy to
use [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Unlike the work presented in this paper, these previous approaches did
not explicitly involve interpersonal attitudes.
3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Theoretical Background</title>
      <p>Our model of politeness of social interactions relies on the combination of two
theories: the interpersonal circumplex and face theory, which are discussed below.
3.1</p>
      <p>
        Face and Politeness Strategies
Brown and Levinson’s work on politeness [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] is based on the notion of face,
which is a person’s public self-image [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]. Brown and Levinson (hereafter, B&amp;L)
distinguish between negative and positive face, which denote one’s need for
freedom and one’s need to be approved of and approving of others, respectively. By
taking an action, a speaker potentially imposes on a hearer’s face by threatening
the latter’s needs—such an action is called a face-threatening act (FTA). B&amp;L
discuss which strategies can be used to minimize the imposition of an FTA—in
other words, how one can be polite. They distinguish the following four strategy
types to do so, ordered from least to most polite:1
Bald on-record Being straight to the point, e.g., “Hand me the book.”
Positive politeness Taking the other’s wants into account, e.g., “Would you
like to hand me the book?”
Negative politeness Not hindering the other’s autonomy, e.g., “If it’s not
inconvenient to you, could you hand me the book?”
O↵ record Being indirect or vague about one’s own wants, e.g., “I don’t seem
to be able to reach that book.”
      </p>
      <p>
        Obviously, these politeness strategies do not take into account that people
might not want to minimize imposition of their FTAs. Being able to deal with
impoliteness is especially important for the law enforcement domain, in which
police o cers and o↵ enders may not care much about each other’s face needs,
leading to dominant or (verbally) aggressive behaviour. To account for such
behaviour, Culpeper et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] investigated impoliteness strategies that are
complementary to B&amp;L’s strategies. They focus on impoliteness strategies through
which the speaker attacks the addressee’s positive and negative face needs.
Indeed, these are the inverse of B&amp;L’s positive and negative face strategies:2
Positive impoliteness Damaging the addressee’s positive face wants by
excluding him or her, being disinterested, disassociating oneself from the
addressee or using taboo words. E.g., “Just hand me the bloody book and leave
me alone.”
Negative impoliteness Damaging the addressee’s negative face wants by
being condescending, frightening him or her or invading his or her space. E.g.,
“Hand me the book now, or I’ll come and get it.”
3.2
      </p>
      <p>
        The Interpersonal Circumplex
Originating in Leary’s work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] as a tool for diagnosis in a psychotherapeutic
setting, a number of varying interpersonal circumplex (IPC) measures of
personality have been developed; see [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] for an overview. The IPC model classifies
attitudes people have toward each other along two axes: that of dominance and
that of a↵ ection.3 Dominance refers to the concepts of one’s own autonomy and
control over others, while a↵ ection stands for a liating and being
accommodating toward or approving of others.
      </p>
      <p>
        Evaluations of the IPC show that each degree of dominance and a↵ ection
corresponds to a stance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. Scherer defines stances as being “characteristic of
1 An exhaustive list of instantiations of these strategies can be found in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ].
2 See [3, p. 1555] for more examples of impoliteness strategies.
3 We adopt these terms as we feel they are clear and unambiguous; variants include
‘agency and communion’ [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ], ‘autonomy and friendliness’ and ‘dominance and
sociability’.
an a↵ ective style that spontaneously develops or is strategically employed in
the interaction with a person or a group of persons, colouring the interpersonal
exchange in that situation,” [11, p. 705]. For example, one might be dominant
and hostile toward someone (high dominance, low a↵ ection), resulting in an
‘arrogant’ stance, or one may adopt a submissive and a↵ ectionate attitude (low
dominance, high a↵ ection), which results in an ‘agreeable’ stance. Figure 1 shows
an example mapping of these two dimensions to a circle and a division into eight
octants, each of these corresponding to a stance with a descriptive adjective
based on the Interpersonal Adjective Scales [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Unsympathetic
Introverted</p>
      <p>Dominance
Arrogant Assured</p>
      <p>Unassured</p>
      <p>Unassuming</p>
      <p>A
f
Extraverted fec</p>
      <p>
        t
Agreeable i
o
n
In this section, we propose a model for generating politeness strategies. This
model is based on two ideas: (1) politeness strategies can be mixed (section 4.1)
and (2) the interpersonal circumplex and politeness theories about face are based
on the same principles (section 4.2). In section 4.3, we explain how the model
can be used to construct actions for socially interacting agents.
Most computational approaches to politeness look at how face-threatening
certain acts are by ranking the face threats of those acts in varying ways. For
example, following B&amp;L, Walker et al. sum the social distance between the
interaction partners, the relative power of one over the other and a static value
for imposition of the act [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref2">2, 15</xref>
        ]. Based on the result, one of the four
politeness strategies is then selected to realise the speech act, with the more polite
strategies (negative or o↵ record) being used for the bigger face threats.
      </p>
      <p>
        In our opinion, such a one-dimensional ranking of face threats and politeness
strategies disregards the basis of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, namely
that an act may threaten both positive and negative face. This suggests that a
combination of strategies could be used to minimize both impositions. However,
B&amp;L oppose the idea of mixing their strategies to express an FTA. They are
aware of such mixing occurring in natural discourse, but assert that such
utterances express multiple FTAs which need to be ranked separately. Nonetheless,
Hasegawa shows that (in Japanese) counterexamples do exist [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. This view is
supported by the observation of Porayska-Pomsta and Mellish that linguistic
politeness strategies can address positive and negative face at the same time, and
should be classified two-dimensionally [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Culpeper et al. show that this also
holds for impoliteness strategies, as the positive impoliteness strategy of using
taboo words can be mixed straightforwardly with negative impoliteness
strategies [3, p. 1561] by simply inserting such words in negative impolite utterances.
Therefore, in our model we assume that mixing politeness strategies is possible.
      </p>
      <p>Dominance</p>
      <p>A
f
f
e
c
Positive ito
politeness n
Negative
politeness</p>
      <p>
        Intrinsic to both IPC theories and B&amp;L’s politeness theory is that they feature
interpersonal relations. Moreover, attitude and stance toward interaction
partners play a key part in the choice of actions and the way they are carried out.
Dominance and a↵ ection, the two dimensions of the IPC, are very similar to
the concepts of negative and positive face, respectively. Clearly, dominance
revolves around the notion of a person’s autonomy. Where the IPC is concerned,
this dimension signifies the person’s own autonomy, whereas negative politeness
strategies address the other’s autonomy. As the autonomy of both parties is
inversely related, we equate a low value for dominance in the IPC to a high
negative face value and vice versa. In other words, when a speaker expresses
little agency, he acts submissively and only threatens the hearer’s negative face
to a small degree. Similarly, we correlate the dimension of positive face—striving
toward acceptance and being approved by others—to that of a↵ ection. In this
case, a low value of a↵ ection corresponds to being ‘disconnected’ [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], which is
directly related to not taking into account the hearer’s positive face. Figure 2
shows how negative and positive politeness can be mapped to dominance and
a↵ ection. When the intention of a speaker is neither to attack an addressee’s
face (be impolite) nor to weaken his FTA (be polite), we assume that he or she
will use B&amp;L’s ‘bald on record’ strategy. In the IPC, this strategy corresponds
to having a ‘neutral’ stance, which is found at the origin of the IPC’s axes.
      </p>
      <p>
        Our model does not include o↵ record strategies at this point. Gupta et al.
showed that o↵ record strategies are not necessarily the most polite, as claimed
by B&amp;L [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. Culpeper et al. suggest a structure parallel to that of politeness
to resolve this [3, p. 1554], but this is outside the scope of this paper. Figure 3
shows the mapping of the di↵ erent combinations of politeness strategies as well
as the inclusion of the neutral ‘bald on record’ strategy.
4.3
      </p>
      <p>Utterance Realisations
As shown above, the di↵ erent politeness strategies addressing negative and
positive face can be mapped straightforwardly to IPC stances. Thus, we can
construct actions for a given stance by combining the politeness strategies that
correspond to that stance. We limit our approach by only taking five stances
into account, namely the four combinations of high and low dominance or a↵
ection and a fifth ‘neutral’ stance which represents the origin of the two axes of
the IPC. That is, we do not divide the IPC into eight stances as in Fig. 1, but
take the stances of each of the four quarters of the IPC (for example, ‘arrogant’
and ‘unsympathetic’) together as one stance, as shown in Fig. 3.</p>
      <p>Based on the intention of a speaker and a given stance, we can realise an
utterance within a given scenario. For example, in a situation in which a few
loitering juveniles are playing loud music on a square, the police o cer’s intention
will probably be to reduce the noise level. He then needs to carry out the act of
asking the juveniles to turn down the volume, which both limits their freedom (a
negative face threat) and implies disapproval (a positive face threat). When the
police o cer has a dominant yet a↵ ectionate stance, he will, according to our
theory, use a positive politeness strategy combined with a negative impoliteness
strategy (+P N in Fig. 3).</p>
      <p>We mix di↵ erent politeness strategies by creating complex sentences
consisting of two clauses, each of which is an instantiation of one type of
politeness strategy. Since each clause expresses a di↵ erent dialogue act, this approach
seemingly reflects B&amp;L’s opinion about how strategies cannot be mixed in one
utterance (see section 4.1). However, we see the compound sentence, taken as
a whole, as capturing the intention of being dominant and being a↵ ectionate
concurrently (or, equivalently, being negatively impolite and positively polite at
the same time). This is in line with the findings of Porayska-Pomsta and Mellish</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>Loitering juveniles have just told the police o cer to go away. The police officer refuses.</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>Juveniles are smoking in a shopping mall; the police o cer wants to inform them this is not allowed.</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>Loitering juveniles are playing loud music; the police o cer wants them to dim the noise.</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-4">
        <title>The police o cer has just</title>
        <p>asked the juveniles to
move away, but after a
short discussion he
decides to let them stay
against his will.</p>
        <p>Juveniles are bothering
passers-by in a shopping
mall. The police o cer
wants to make clear that
people are feeling
harassed.
+A +D
+A</p>
        <p>D
A +D
A D</p>
        <p>Politeness
strategies
+P N
(convey
cooperation,
condescend/ridicule)</p>
        <p>Utterance
“As if I would take orders
from you! We can work
this out together.”
+P +N “I like a smoke now and
(raise com- then as well, but did you
mon ground, know that smoking isn’t
question) actually allowed here?”</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-5">
        <title>P N (un- “What a racket! You have</title>
        <p>sympathetic, to stop this immediately.”
invade space)</p>
        <p>
          P +N (dis- “I’m sorry to have
bothassociate, ered you, but this is going
apologize) nowhere anyway.”
0A 0D
(neutral)
0P 0N (bald “Some people feel
haon record) rassed by you.”
[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ]. In a corpus of tutoring dialogues they observed complex strategies that
consisted of a main strategy used to express the main message of an act, combined
with an auxiliary strategy used to express redress.
        </p>
        <p>In the example scenario, the positive politeness strategy of a police o cer
would for instance be to say “I understand that you want to chill and listen
to music,” through which he tries to claim common ground and attend to the
juveniles’ interests. The negative impoliteness strategy could be instantiated by
saying “You have to stop this immediately,” which shows the police o cer’s
resolve to impose on the juveniles’ autonomy. Taken together, these two sentences
will be the police o cer’s utterance when he takes an a↵ ectionate but
dominant stance: “I understand that you want to chill and listen to music, but you
have to stop this immediately.” Table 1 lists a variety of example utterances
(translated from Dutch) that we constructed based on di↵ erent scenarios and
di↵ erent stances of a police o cer toward a group of loitering juveniles. These
and other utterances were used in a small user experiment to evaluate our model,
as described below.
5</p>
        <p>Pilot Study
To validate our ideas about the relations between a person’s stance and the
politeness of that person’s utterances, we conducted a small user experiment.
By means of a survey we intended to find out whether politeness strategies
indeed correspond to stances as proposed in our model.
5.1</p>
        <p>
          Method and Measures
We carried out an online survey in which participants were asked to give their
opinion about the stance of a police o cer who is addressing a group of loitering
juveniles in various scenarios. For this survey, we constructed a collection of
utterances for the police o cer based on five di↵ erent stances, as described in
the previous section. In the design of these utterances, we took two additional
factors into account, namely that both speech act types as well as contextual
content of utterances may influence the face-threat of an act, as noted by Walker
et al. [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
          ]. Therefore, we designed utterances for four di↵ erent speech act types,
namely inform, request, reject and acknowledge. For each of these speech act
types, we conceived two scenarios with a di↵ erent context to provide a broad
collection of situations. For example, for the request speech act type, we let the
police o cer ask juveniles to turn down their loud music in one scenario and
let him ask the juveniles to move away from their hangout place in another.
Per scenario, we constructed six utterances. Five of these were constructed as
explained in the previous section and one was a ‘distractor’ item. The latter
was devised to o↵ er more variety in the survey as well as to make it harder
for participants to see through the pattern of the survey questions. In total,
we created 48 utterances across 8 scenarios, with each scenario containing 6
utterances of which 5 according to di↵ erent stances and one being a distractor.
        </p>
        <p>At the beginning of the survey, we explained to the participants that they had
to judge the stance of the police o cer based on his utterances. We explained that
they should do so by rating the police o cer’s intended dominance and a↵ ection
toward the juveniles. Participants could indicate their ratings of dominance and
a↵ ection on two distinct Likert-scales ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 stood for
‘not at all’ and 5 for ‘completely’. Furthermore, we made clear that only verbal
actions were included in the scenarios and that none of these utterances should
be taken to be sarcastic or ironic.</p>
        <p>After having read the instructions and having indicated they understood
them, the participants were presented with one of the eight di↵ erent scenarios
and the six corresponding police o cer utterances. After rating the intended
dominance and a↵ ection of the police o cer, participants were asked if they had
any comments or critique on the utterances, which they could write down in
a text input field. Then, they could continue to the next scenario. Finally, we
collected information on the participants’ age and gender. We also asked them
about their familiarity with interpersonal circumplex theories and theories on
politeness and face, as such familiarity might have influenced their judgements.
A total of 18 participants took part in our survey, of which 9 males, 8 females
and one person who did not wish to indicate his or her gender. The average age
of the participants was 29.9 (SD = 9.3). The majority of the participants (13)
indicated that they did not know or had only heard of the IPC; 5 knew the basics
of the theory or had more in-depth understanding. Almost all participants (15)
indicated that they had never heard of B&amp;L’s politeness strategies.</p>
        <p>We calculated the means of the participants’ ratings of the utterances for
each of the five described stances; n = 144 utterances per stance (8 scenarios, 18
participants). Then, we performed one-sample t-tests to investigate whether the
mean ratings of utterances were significantly di↵ erent from the neutral values for
dominance and a↵ ection (in both cases, the neutral value was 3, the middle of our
Likert-scales which ran from 1 to 5). Table 2 shows the means, standard
deviations and one-sample t-test results. Only the most impolite ( P N ) utterances
had average ratings for both dominance and a↵ ection that di↵ ered significantly
from the neutral value. In all other cases, at most one of the ratings di↵ ered
from neutral, and not always in the predicted direction. Interestingly, the mean
a↵ ection rating of neutral stance utterances (0A 0D) did di↵ er significantly from
the (in this case desired) neutral value.</p>
        <p>Next, we investigated the di↵ erences between the means of the di↵ erent
stance utterances through paired-samples t-tests. Here, the most obvious
difference was between the most impolite ( A +D, P N ) and the most
polite (+A D, +P +N ) utterances; t(17) = 7.34, p &lt; .001 for dominance and
t(17) = 6.73, p &lt; .001 for a↵ ection. These results show that, indeed,
utterances combining two (negative and positive) impoliteness strategies were rated
as more dominant and less a↵ ectionate than utterances that combined two
politeness strategies. Similar results were achieved when comparing the most impolite
( A +D) utterances with the other utterances; the only type of utterance that
did not di↵ er significantly from the A +D category was the neutral type.</p>
        <p>Most of the purely polite or impolite (+P +N and P N ) utterances
proved to di↵ er significantly from the utterances that combined polite and
impolite strategies (+P N and P +N , used to express the +A +D and A D
stances respectively). Specifically, they di↵ ered in the mean rating of the stance
dimension that was varied between the utterances. For example, the purely
impolite A +D utterances were rated as significantly more dominant than the
‘mixed’ A D utterances; t(17) = 6.74, p &lt; .001. Similarly, ratings of a↵ ection
for the impolite A +D utterances were significantly lower than for the +A + D
utterances; t(17) = 8.04, p &lt; .001. Yet in the latter comparison, the ratings of
dominance were also significantly higher for the A +D utterances than for the
+A + D utterances, even though this dimension was not varied between the two
cases; t(17) = 5.83, p &lt; .001. This unexpected di↵ erence is caused by the low
dominance ratings of the mixed utterances expressing the +A +D stance (as
shown in Table 2). The opposite e↵ ect did however not occur when comparing
the ratings of the purely polite +A D utterances to those of the mixed +A +D
utterances; these ratings did not di↵ er significantly.
5.3</p>
        <p>Discussion
The results of our pilot study show that, on average, the utterances we
constructed were rated close to the neutral middle of the dominance and a↵ ection
scales. This lack of ‘extreme’ utterances may explain why utterances that were
intended to be neutral were rated as being as dominant and una↵ ectionate as
those that were intended to be the most dominant and the least a↵ ectionate.
However, this rating may also be an indication that neutral utterances are, in
their directness, indeed always very bald to the point of being impolite.</p>
        <p>Some participants commented that they found it hard to judge the police
o cer’s stance based on the presented utterances, as there was (1) no information
about the intonation of the utterances and (2) insu cient context to determine
how dominant or a↵ ective the police o cer ‘ought’ to be. This may be the case
because the extreme ends of the scales could be interpreted as the police o cer
being overly dominant or a↵ ectionate, as one participant indicated. Moreover,
some of the participants expected the police o cers to behave in a much more
dominant and much less a↵ ectionate fashion than included in the survey.</p>
        <p>Nevertheless, the results do confirm our hypothesis that, at least for
dominant/una↵ ectionate and submissive/a↵ ectionate stances, B&amp;L’s politeness
strategies can be used to construct utterances that reflect these stances. Although
mixing positive strategies with negative strategies generally worked well,
mixing polite strategies with impolite strategies sometimes resulted in successfully
expressing the predicted stance, but at other times resulted in ambiguous
utterances (as participants commented). Mixing politeness and impoliteness also
caused dominant/a↵ ectionate utterances to be rated as much less dominant than
predicted.</p>
        <p>Based on these findings we see various ways to improve our model. First and
foremost, we need to support a wider variety of utterances that cover more
gradations of dominance and a↵ ection. To do so, we plan to gather more domain
knowledge from both police o cers and (former) loiterers. This will also help to
provide a richer context for the scenarios. Furthermore, we plan to investigate
how politeness strategies can be mixed so that they are perceived as less
ambiguous. Lastly, we believe that to make utterances better express stances, we
should look at the processes underlying the adoption of stances, for example by
investigating how people appraise events in terms of face values. In future work,
we will first investigate the possible correlations of speech acts and di↵ erent
contexts with the ratings of utterances, as these correlations are not addressed in
this paper due to space constraints.
6</p>
        <p>Conclusion
Being socially aware is of great importance to police o cers during their
dayto-day dealings with civilians. To assist them in attaining this awareness, we
are designing a serious game that will include virtual agents with which police
o cers can train their social skills. This paper outlines the first steps we have
taken toward creating models that will inform the behaviour of these agents.</p>
        <p>
          Our approach combines the interpersonal circumplex theory [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
          ] and Brown
and Levinson’s theory about politeness [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ]. We assert that both these
theories share the same fundamentals of social interaction, namely that people have
needs for autonomy (dominance) and for a↵ ection. In our model, we state that
stances (following the interpersonal circumplex theory) correspond to politeness
strategies. That is, an agent with a dominant stance will use negative
impoliteness while an agent with an a↵ ectionate stance will use positive politeness.
Conversely, a submissive stance is expressed through negative politeness and
an una↵ ectionate stance though positive impoliteness. Our second assertion was
that these politeness strategies can be mixed to account for all di↵ erent stances.
        </p>
        <p>To determine the validity of our model, we conducted a small user study in
which we let participants rate utterances of police o cers on the dominant and
a↵ ectionate stance dimensions. The results from our experiment support our
model in the case of utterances mixing either both positive and negative polite
or positive and negative impolite clauses. However, ratings of utterances based
on combinations of impolite and polite strategies did not completely meet our
expectations, as they were sometimes perceived as ambiguous. To overcome such
ambiguity, we intend to investigate in more detail how such utterances influence
an addressee’s autonomy and a↵ ection. Additionally, we plan to gather more
domain knowledge to extend the range of possible utterances. We also need to
determine how our agents should react to di↵ erent utterances. In the end, social
interaction does not consist of merely taking stances at face value—this is only
the first step.</p>
        <p>Acknowledgements This publication was supported by the Dutch national
program COMMIT.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
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