Towards a Russian Multimedia Politeness Corpus

Компьютерная лингвистика и интеллектуальные технологии. 2023. No. 22. P. 233–244.

Klokova K., Krongauz M., Shulginov V., Tatiana Yudina

Communication involves an exchange of information as well as the use of linguistic means to begin, sustain, and end conversations. Politeness is seen as one of the major language tools that facilitate smooth communication. In English, politeness has been an area of great interest in pragmatics, with various theories and corpus annotation approaches used to understand the relationship between politeness and social categories like power and gender, and to build Natural Language Processing applications. In Russian linguistics, politeness research has largely focused on lexical markers and speech strategies. This paper introduces the ongoing work on the development of the Russian Multimedia Politeness Corpus and discusses an annotation framework for oral communicative interaction, with an emphasis on adapting politeness theories for discourse annotation. The proposed approach lies in the identification of frames that encompass contextual information and the selection of relevant spatial, social, and relational features for the markup. The frames are then used to describe standard situations, which are marked by typical intentions and politeness formulae and paraverbal markers.

Keywords: sociolinguistics, discourse, speech act, politeness, multimedia corpora