Politeness in Social Networks: Using Verbal Behaviors to Assess Socially-Accorded Regard

Social Network Analysis has proven itself useful at defining interaction paths within a network of individuals and of deriving useful information from the presence and frequency with which they are used. Thus, we can know who talks to whom and how frequently-but “traditional” social network analysis techniques are blind to other aspects of how individuals within such networks relate. We propose the use of politeness behaviors as a means of inferring relationships among members of a social network with comparatively simple linguistic analysis techniques. We report preliminary work adapting a computational implementation of Brown and Levinson´s politeness model to deriving “regard networks” from social interaction data.