@article{3a19304db25b4861bfb59ca1c5a9f848,
title = "Chatbots Language Design: The Influence of Language Variation on User Experience with Tourist Assistant Chatbots",
abstract = "Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic to investigate how a chatbot's language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent performs within a context. We seek to understand whether chatbots design should account for linguistic register. This research analyzes how register differences play a role in shaping the user's perception of the human-chatbot interaction. We produced parallel corpora of conversations in the tourism domain with similar content and varying register characteristics and evaluated users' preferences of chatbot's linguistic choices in terms of appropriateness, credibility, and user experience. Our results show that register characteristics are strong predictors of user's preferences, which points to the needs of designing chatbots with register-appropriate language to improve acceptance and users' perceptions of chatbot interactions.",
keywords = "Chatbots, conversational agents, language design, register, user perceptions",
author = "Chaves, {Ana Paula} and Jesse Egbert and Toby Hocking and Eck Doerry and Gerosa, {Marco Aurelio}",
note = "Funding Information: To Caitlin Abuel and Tyler Conger, NAU CS undergraduate students, for the contributions to the recruitment and qualitative data collection during the lab sessions. This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1815503 and 1900903. Authors{\textquoteright} addresses: A. P. Chaves, Northern Arizona University, 1295 S Knoles Dr, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011, and Federal University of Technology—Paran{\'a}, R. Rosalina Maria dos Santos, 1233, Campo Mour{\~a}o, PR 87301-006, Brazil; email: anachaves@utfpr.edu.br; J. Egbert, Department of English, Northern Arizona University, 705 S Beaver St, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011; email: Jesse.Egbert@nau.edu; T. Hocking, E. Doerry, and M. A. Gerosa, School of Informatics, Computing, and Cy-ber Systems, Northern Arizona University, 1295 S Knoles Dr, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011; emails: {Toby.Hocking, Eck.Doerry, Marco.Gerosa}@nau.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. {\textcopyright} 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. 1073-0516/2022/01-ART13 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3487193 Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.",
year = "2022",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1145/3487193",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "29",
journal = "ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction",
issn = "1073-0516",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)",
number = "2",
}