The Impact of the Gricean Maxims of Quality, Quantity and Manner in Chatbots
Baptiste Jacquet, Alexandre Hullin, Jean Baratgin, Frank Jamet · 2019
Pragmatics between artificial conversational partners in online discussions remain to this day an under-developed field of research despite the rapidly increasing demand for artificial conversational partners. In this study, we evaluate the contribution of violations of conversational pragmatics, in particular, the Gricean Maxims of Quality (truthfulness), of Quantity (no over-describing) and Manner (no ambiguity), on the response times of participants in a protocol inspired by the Turing Test. As previous studies have also shown the influence of gender on the response times in online textual conversations, we evaluate the influence of this factor. We expected violations of the different maxims to increase the response times in two of our conditions: when producing violations of the maxim of Quality and of the maxim of Quantity. We also expected this effect to be more pronounced for males than for females since the literature has shown that females usually have better language skills than males. Our results are coherent with these expectations as only violations of the maxims of Quality and of Quantity had a significant effect, and for the latter only for male participants. Violations of the maxim of Quality also had a substantial effect on the humanness of the conversational partner.