Jorge A. Baier

Author directory

2026

Politeness is key to building healthy communication. Brown and Levinson’s influential theory of politeness (BL’s theory) proposes that polite speech can be characterized by the presence of face-saving speech acts while impolite speech is characterized by the presence of face-threatening speech acts. Most existing politeness resources neither operationalize nor control politeness under BL’s theory; instead, they typically consist of short utterances with an intuitive account of politeness. In this paper, we introduce a long-text corpus that includes sentence-level face-act annotations and document-level politeness scores. Following BL’s theory, we annotate politeness along three dimensions: Directness vs. Indirectness, Positive Face Saving, and Negative Face Saving, and define Overall Politeness as their average. We formulate face-act tagging as a multi-label classification task and compare context-agnostic sentence classifiers to context-sensitive variants and sequence-labeling models. We also model document-level politeness via multi-target regression using the text, and enhance the regression model with the predictions of our face-act classifier. We show that context-sensitive classifiers outperform context-free classifiers for face-act tagging. Moreover, we demonstrate that for document-level politeness regression, enhancing the text with face-act predictions yields better performance. Our code and data are available online: alipanahroshad-oss/email-politeness-corpus