Power and Politeness in Interactions: ADMIRE - A Tool for Deriving the Former from the Latter

We describe the background theory, implementation and experimental validation of a tool (ADMIRE, for Assessment of Discourse Media Indicators of Relative Esteem) which recognizes and scores politeness behaviors in the textual interactions of multiple individuals in order to derive power relations among them. ADMIRE´s implementation architecture and scalability is described, along with an innovative approach to creating and drawing power networks (roughly similar to organizational charts) from the power relationships inferred from politeness usages between speakers and hearers in a large body of interactions. While ADMIRE was developed and preliminarily tested on email, transcribed spoken dialogue and Internet Relay Chat data, it was formally tested in a large, weeklong military simulation exercise (Empire Challenge 2010) where it proved 100% successful at deriving ground truth power relationships in 3 military chat rooms used throughout the week.