{"pk":27450,"title":"“I won’t lie, it wasn’t amazing”: Modeling polite indirect speech","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Why are we polite when we talk to one another? One hypoth-esis is that people expect others to choose what to say basedon their goals both to transfer information efficiently (an epis-temic goal) and to make the listener feel good (a social goal).In our previous work, we found that when these two goals con-flict, they sometimes produce white lies. In the current work,we expand on this theory to consider another prominent case ofpolite speech: indirect remarks using negation (e.g., “It wasn’tamazing”). With minimal extensions from our previous frame-work, our formal model suggests that a pragmatic speaker willproduce more indirect remarks when the speaker wants to beinformative and seem considerate at the same time. Thesepredictions were borne out in a language production experi-ment. These findings suggest that the conflict between socialand epistemic goals can account for a broad range of politenessphenomena.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Politeness; computational modeling; communica-tive goals; pragmatics"}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wm9r5b2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Erica","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Yoon","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T21:00:00+03:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27450/galley/17086/download/"}]}