ADMIRE: Assessment of Discourse Media Indicators of Relative Esteem

SIFT has created a computational model of the Brown and Levinson’ s politeness theory, refined it over 5 years of projects, and used it both to simulate behavior in online agents and to predict perceptions of politeness, power, familiarity and imposition among observers.

SIFT has been awarded a contract called ADMIRE under ONR BAA08-012, POC Martin Krueger (703-696-5349). SIFT has created a computational model of the Brown and Levinson’ s politeness  theory, refined it over 5 years of projects, and used it both to simulate behavior in online agents and to predict perceptions of politeness, power, familiarity and imposition among observers. Our model uses swappable culture modules that make it readily extensible. We have layered in a consideration of cultural factors (e.g., Hofstede) and have performed validation experiments in cross rater comparisons, and in ongoing experiments on politeness and directive compliance. ADMIRE uses SIFT’s etiquette engine to model how people’s attitudes towards each other are evidenced in written dialog interactions. Specifically, this program will create a power/regard network of relationships between people using information about the respect a writer appears to accord another user by use of honorifics and other redressive.  ADMIRE infers information about relationships.