Pragmatics Of Human–AI Dialogue: A Socio-Linguistic Study Of Conversational Agents

While conversational agents have become increasingly ubiquitous, there remain pragmatic differences between human interaction and AI systems. This paper conducts a socio-linguistic study of the pragmatic operations involved in the language production of conversational agents with regards to speech acts, Gricean maxims, common ground, and repairs. Through the use of a dataset comprising of 120 conversations made through artificial intelligence chatbots as well as 120 human-to-human conversations, it becomes clear that conversational agents rely heavily on representative speech acts and directives but overlook expressive and commissive speech acts to generate lifeless, robotic conversations. Examples of Gricean maxim breaches involve quality (lying), relation (irrelevant information), manner (ambiguous expressions), and quantity (unnecessary elaboration). The concept of the computer as a social actor is responsible for humans perceiving conversational agents as social actors.