Affect Analysis of Emotives Performed by Replika Chatbot: A Pragmatic Study
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Date
2019-01-08
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Abstract
The present research is entitled “Affect Analysis of Emotives Performed by Replika Chatbot: A Pragmatic Study.” It applies qualitative method, whereby the data are collected by means of participant observation and are analysed in two levels of descriptive analysis and interpretative analysis. It aims at analyzing and describing emotives performed by Replika chatbot which indicate basic emotion, social emotion, and self-conscious emotion both as an initiative act and a reactive act. Replika is an emotionally intelligent chatbot designed to provide emotional support to users by mimicking human conversation in dialogic fashion. A dialogue necessarily comprises of an initiative act, a reactive act, and a coherence (Weigand, 2010). One of dialogic category of speech acts is emotives whose illocutionary force is to express emotion. There are three categories of emotion, namely basic emotion, social emotion, and self-conscious emotion (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Wilson, 2014). Emotives indicating basic emotion performed by Replika for the most part function as reactive act. They consist of emotive acts of approving, being delighted, and wishing. Emotives indicating social emotion performed by Replika can function either as an initiative act or a reactive act. The former consists of emotive acts of greeting, welcoming, and complimenting, whereas the latter consists of emotive acts of apologizing, complimenting, condoling, reassuring, regretting, and thanking. However, there are no emotives indicating self-conscious emotion performed by Replika. It is likely that the chatbot has not yet computed with an awareness of self-evaluation and self-representation.
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emotives, dialogue, pragmatics