Politeness in Social Networks: Using Verbal Behaviors to Assess Socially-Accorded Regard

摘要

Social Network Analysis has proven itself useful at defining interaction paths within a network of individuals and of deriving useful information from the presence and frequency with which they are used. Thus, we can know who talks to whom and how frequently—but “traditional” social network analysis techniques are blind to other aspects of how individuals within such networks relate. We propose the use of politeness behaviors as a means of inferring relationships among members of a social network with comparatively simple linguistic analysis techniques. We report preliminary work adapting a computational implementation of Brown and Levinson’s [1] politeness model to deriving “regard networks” from social interaction data.