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

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.

Staging the Social Drama of Work: Ethnography of a Theater Company as a Means of Analyzing Theater Activity

This paper shows how conducting the ethnographic study of a theater hall and company can help define theater activity. Once the aesthetic of the social organization is set apart from the proper division of labor, theater appears as a collective activity which requires the cooperation of eight groups playing different social roles. The cooperation modes rest on a meshing of direct or indirect services for the actors who carry out the core task of performing. This specific organization of work around a central group is what makes the activity artistic. Simultaneously, the service relation offers the possibility for some categories to bring their relationship with actors closer to a state of symmetry and sometimes reverse asymmetry. As a status enhancing opportunity, service relationship for actors also directly or indirectly provide the grounds for participant commitment and thus guarantee long-lasting operation for the theatrical organization.

Co-Creation of Public Values

Well-being is of vital importance for individuals as well as society at large. UNs Sustainability Goal #17, ‘Partnership for the Goals', support co-creation and co-production as necessary approaches to reach public values such as citizenship, social justice, and well-being. However, co-creation and co-production is not enough. It is necessary to address who participates in co-creation, how they participate, and how participation affects outcomes. Inclusive participation in everyday life, public services, and democracy is crucial to achieve active citizenship and well-being for all. This chapter will discuss how voices of citizens in marginalized and vulnerable life situations needs to be included and recognized in democracy and public sector practices as well as in decision-making processes. The chapter suggests how public sector organisations can promote active citizenship, valued social roles, and well-being through participation in co-creation of public values, placing well-being for all and social justice at the forefront of public value co-creation.

„Bezradność, niemożność, zdziwienie i konieczność natychmiastowego kłamstwa”. Produkty uboczne Lopeza Mausere [“Powerlessness, Impotence, Astonishment, and the Need for an Immediate Lie”: The Byproducts of Lopez Mausere]

“Powerlessness, Impotence, Astonishment, and the Need for an Immediate Lie”: The Byproducts of Lopez MausereThe article focuses on the question of national, gender, and religious identity in the poetry and other writings of Wojciech Stamm, also known as Lopez Mausere and Gertruda Jarząbek. Mausere’s affiliation with the Polish Failures Club (Club der Polnischen Versager) in Berlin and the relationships between his biography and literature are examined as well. The author contends that Mausere’s concept of poetry as a genre similar to a joke, anecdote, mistake or deliberate deception, as well as his use of low, slang or colloquial registers of language, reflect Stamm’s belief that the carnivalized upside-down world is more real than the illusion produced by social roles, norms, statuses, hierarchies, and identities. Thus, failure to perform one’s role or normative identity might ultimately prove more creative and meaningful than the proper observance of prevalent social mores. „Bezradność, niemożność, zdziwienie i konieczność natychmiastowego kłamstwa”. Produkty uboczne Lopeza MausereArtykuł koncentruje się na kwestiach tożsamości narodowej, płciowej i religijnej w poezji i innych tekstach Wojciecha Stamma, znanego też jako Lopez Mausere i Gertruda Jarząbek. Przedmiotem badania jest także uczestnictwo Mausere w Klubie Polskich Nieudaczników (Club der Polnischen Versager) w Berlinie oraz inne powiązania pomiędzy jego biografią a literaturą. Autor artykułu twierdzi, że zarówno koncepcja poezji Mausere’a, zestawiająca twórczość poetycką z następującymi gatunkami: dowcip, anegdota, pomyłka lub celowe wprowadzenie w błąd, jak i wykorzystanie niskich, żargonowych czy potocznych rejestrów języka, odzwierciedlają przekonanie pisarza, że skarnawalizowany świat na opak bywa bardziej rzeczywisty niż iluzja stwarzana przez role społeczne, normy, statusy, hierarchie i tożsamości. Stąd porażka w odgrywaniu czyjejś roli albo normatywnej tożsamości może okazać się bardziej twórcza i znacząca niż prawidłowe dostosowanie się do zestawu reguł obowiązujących w przestrzeni społecznej.

Stereotypes and sexism? Effects of gender, topic, and user comments on journalists’ credibility

Gendered social roles raise assumptions about what female and male journalists ought to do. Prior studies have suggested that covering counter-stereotypical topics may decrease journalists’ source and their work’s message credibility. Pertaining also to prior studies on heuristic cues for credibility evaluation, user comments have been shown to serve as corrective, both positively and negatively affecting the perception of accompanying content. In an online survey with 417 German participants, we employed a 3 (author: female, male, and computer) × 2 (topic: stereotypically masculine and feminine) × 2 (comments: sexist and non-sexist) experimental design to investigate source and message credibility. Findings do not show differences in gender perception but between human authors (either female or male) and a computer (the control group). Covering counter-stereotypical topics indicates slightly less credibility for men and women if presented with non-sexist comments. In turn, sexist comments lead to slightly higher credibility, suggesting more elaborate engagement with sexism-affected content.

Women’s Hairstyles and Head Ornamentation of the Yakuts in the 18th century

Mass Christianization of the peoples of Yakutia (Eastern Siberia) at the end of the 18th century led to the development of a demotic Christianity throughout the 19th century. There were new rules, according to which a woman was not permitted to appear in public with her head uncovered, and therefore the marking function of the hairstyles became obsolete. This could explain the absence of rituals and rules associated with women’s hair and hairstyles in the Yakut culture of the 19th–20th centuries. The aim of this study is to prove a hypothesis, according to which pendants of hair ornamentation duplicate braids, and studying the pendants of the headrest ‘nachel’nik’ allows recreation of women’s hairstyle that had been in use before the period of mass Christianization. The article is based on the analysis of written, material, and visual sources of the 18th–19th centuries. Information about the hairstyles and adornments of the Yakuts is contained within the records of travelers of the 18th–19th centuries. Among the ethnographic works on the peoples of Siberia, one can find drawings depicting maidens and women, where particular attention is given to their hair. These materials were correlated with the data of the archaeological excavations of Yakut female burials of the 18th century. The obtained results were compared with the materials from the 19th century — photographs of women in national costumes and jewelry from museum collections. According to the results of the study, it can be stated that there was a tradition of changing maiden’s hairstyle to woman’s hairstyle in the context of the wedding ritualism. New rules of conduct, social roles, especially regulations on the appearance of women, were formalized in the society in the 19th century with the mass Christianization of the peoples of Yakutia. There were new rules, according to which a woman was not permitted to appear in public with her head uncovered, and therefore the marking function of hairstyles became obsolete. This could explain the absence of rituals and rules associated with women’s hair and hairstyles in the Yakut culture of the 19th–20th centuries.

Times and masks in texts by and about Emiliyan Stanev

The article explores the masks Emiliyan Stanev uses to participate in the literary life of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. It also analyzes the attitude of literary scholarship towards the writer’s various manifestations. It comes to the conclusion that in order to defend his literary existence and to ensure literary publicity for his texts, the author had to simultaneously perform several – in certain cases mutually exclusive – social roles.

Psychological Peculiarities of Personal Dissonance of Adolescents in the Sphere of Real and Ideal Self-Image

Adolescence is characterized by contradictions of role behaviours and perceptions caused by age adjustment of adolescents. This is reflected in the system of self-attitudes of adolescents, which can lead to intrapersonal conflicts due to the dissonance of conceptions about their own real and ideal self-image. Such dissonances can hinder the construction of one’s own social roles. Therefore, timely detection of risks of personal dissonance emergence in the sphere of subjective perceptions of one’s own real and ideal self-images becomes one of the leading tasks of providing psychological and psychotherapeutic aid to adolescents, aimed at harmonizing their formation in the process of socialization. The aim of the research is to study the factors that determine the psychological peculiarities of personal dissonance of adolescents in the sphere of real and ideal self-image. The research is based on the use of psychodiagnostic methods of Leary (2004) and Pantileev (1993) for the survey of 303 adolescents of both sexes at the age of 14-17, who recognize the presence of discrepancies between real and ideal self-images. Empirical data has shown a relationship between a constellation of psychological factors that determine the emergence of personal dissonances in the sphere of authoritarianism, dominance, suspicion, aggression, subordination, dependency, friendship and altruism. The research will help to understand the psychological factors of the emergence and functioning of personal dissonances of adolescents, which affect both the system of their self-attitude and the building of their social ties. This opens up prospects for improving psychoprophylactic measures aimed at preventing personal dissonances in adolescents.