No Universal Courtesy: A Cross-Linguistic, Multi-Model Study of Politeness Effects on LLMs Using the PLUM Corpus
This paper explores the response of Large Language Models (LLMs) to user prompts with different degrees of politeness and impoliteness. The Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson and the Impoliteness Framework by Culpeper form the basis of experiments conducted across three languages (English, Hindi, Spanish), five models (Gemini-Pro, GPT-4o Mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek-Chat, and Llama 3), and three interaction histories between users (raw, polite, and impolite). Our sample consists of 22,500 pairs of prompts and responses of various types, evaluated across five levels of politeness using an eight-factor assessment framework: coherence, clarity, depth, responsiveness, context retent...
| Authors | Hitesh Mehta, Arjit Saxena, Garima Chhikara et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 April 2026 |
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