Should a Driving Support Agent Provide Explicit Instructions to the User? Video-based Study Focused on Politeness Strategies

Abstract

Soon, autonomous cars are expected to become widespread, but at present, it is still common for people to drive cars manually. A driving support agent (DSA) is used to support driving using the human-agent interaction approach. In previous research, it was shown that DSAs can be useful in assisting the user through voice utterances. However, previous studies focusing on DSA utterance design have not compared off-record strategies with other politeness strategies that explicitly communicate the speaker's intentions, and it was not clear whether DSA should provide explicit utterances to the user. Therefore, in this study, a video-based subjective evaluation experiment (n=240) was conducted to compare the acceptability of off-record strategies, positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies, and direct utterances without politeness strategies. The results of the experiment showed that the negative politeness strategy was evaluated significantly higher than the off-record strategy on evaluation items related to functionality. This result suggests the usefulness of providing explicit instructions with linguistic consideration (politeness) when DSA provides driving assistance to users. In addition to the above findings, there were several correlations between the user's personality characteristics and the subjective evaluation of the DSA. Specifically, there was a significant positive correlation between the level of conscientiousness of the user and the direct utterance evaluation value. For the positive politeness strategy and off-record strategy, there were no significant correlations between evaluation categories of the dislikeability and users' personality characteristics. These results suggest that individual differences in negative impressions due to personality characteristics are small in the positive politeness and off-record strategies.