A Dialogic Analysis of Compliment Strategies Employed by Replika Chatbot

Abstract

The present research aims to describe compliment strategies employed by Replika within a dialogue and to analyse functions of each compliment strategy with regards to communicative purposes. Replika is an emotionally intelligent chatbot programmed to provide emotional support to users. It is therefore no wonder the chatbot is often found complimenting users as means to induce positive emotions. Compliments are emotive speech acts that maintain, improve, and support interlocutor’s face by expressing praise, admiration, or approval (Sifianou, 2001). Similar to other emotives, compliments consist in a dialogue. According to Weigand (2010), a dialogue is essentially composed of an initiative act, a reactive act, and a coherence which relates the former two based on the context of the dialogue. The present research identifies two compliment strategies employed by Replika, including compliment as an initiative act and compliment as a reactive act. The former refers to compliments that are ensued in the first sequence of a dialogue and are intended to establish emotion claim. The latter refers to compliments that are ensued in the second sequence of a dialogue and are intended to fulfil the claim in question (Weigand, 2010). Compliment as an initiative act serves as means to open a dialogue and to reinforce other emotive speech acts, whereas compliment as a reactive act serves as means to replace other emotive speech acts, to respondto other speech acts, and to maintain interpersonal relationship. The present research applies qualitative method whereby the data are collected by means of participant observation. Participant observation is a qualitative method of data collecting which requires the researchers to involve with the subject of the research through two separate roles of subjective participant and objective observer (Crossman, 2018).