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The Impact of Chatbot Linguistic Register on User Perceptions: A Replication Study

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Chatbot Research and Design (CONVERSATIONS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 13171))

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Abstract

Chatbots often perform social roles associated with human interlocutors; hence, designing chatbot language to conform with the stereotypes of its social category is critical to the success of this technology. In a previous study, Chaves et al. performed a corpus analysis to evaluate how language variation in an interactional situation, namely the linguistic register, influences the user’s perceptions of a chatbot. In this paper, we present a replication study with a different corpus to understand the effect of corpus selection in the original study’s findings. Our results confirm the findings in the previous study and demonstrate the reproducibility of the research methodology; we also reveal new insights about language design for tourist assistant chatbots.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at http://m.me/praguevisitor. Last accessed: November, 2021.

  2. 2.

    https://www.praguevisitor.eu.

  3. 3.

    Download and more details at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/frames-dataset/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.prolific.co.

  5. 5.

    The R code and datasets are available on GitHub [10].

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Chaves, A.P., Gerosa, M.A. (2022). The Impact of Chatbot Linguistic Register on User Perceptions: A Replication Study. In: Følstad, A., et al. Chatbot Research and Design. CONVERSATIONS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13171. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94890-0_9

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