Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human dialogue is governed by communicative norms thatspeakers are expected to follow in order to be viewed as coop-erative dialogue partners. Accordingly, for language-capableautonomous agents to be effective human teammates they mustbe able to understand and generate language that complieswith those norms. Moreover, these linguistic norms are highlycontext sensitive, requiring autonomous agents to be able tomodel the contextual factors that dictate when and how thosenorms are applied. In this work, we consider three key lin-guistic norms (directness, brevity, and politeness), and exam-ine the extent to which adherence to these norms varies underchanges to three key contextual factors (potential for harm, in-terlocutor authority, and time pressure). Our results, based ona human-subject study involving 5,642 human utterances, pro-vide strong evidence that speakers do indeed vary their adher-ence to these norms under changes to these contextual factors.