Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Politeness is a social linguistic phenomenon. Modeling polite language production and understanding is difficult, as it may contradict conversational maxims and is shaped by extralinguistic social influences, such as the speaker-hearer relationship. This paper extends Yoon et al.'s (2016) Rational Speech Act-based model of politeness by mapping speaker-hearer relationship influences to the utility weights of the model and instantiates it in German. Three online experiments, for empirical analysis and collection of behavioural data for model training and evaluation, are presented. These confirm the influence of the speaker-hearer relations on indirect politeness. Furthermore, two versions of the model are trained and evaluated to find out which part of the model is better suited for the integration of social influences. Overall, both model versions yielded similar results and were able to predict the meaning of polite speech acts.