Mathematical analysis

Psychology

Context (archaeology)

Philosophy

Physics

Register (sociolinguistics)

Neuroscience

Mathematics

Domain (mathematical analysis)

Biology

Political science

Tourism

Astrophysics

Human–computer interaction

Perception

Computer science

World Wide Web

Variation (astronomy)

Linguistics

Chatbot

Credibility

Paleontology

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

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.

Chatbots Language Design: The Influence of Language Variation on User Experience with Tourist Assistant Chatbots