Linguistic Differences in Real Conversations: Human to Human vs Human to Chatbot

Abstract

This study investigates how students communicate in writing when they know that their conversational partner is a human being in comparison to how they communicate when they know their partner is a chatbot. The participants are upper secondary students of English. The investigation took place in a school in Sweden where English is taught as a foreign language. The students wrote to their peers through Instant Messaging (IM) and to the chatbot ‘Mitsuku’ through the website of ‘pandorabots’. The conversations were compared, and their linguistic variables were distinguished according to the following dimensions: words per message and per conversation, messages per conversation, lexical diversity, frequency of profanity and use of abbreviations, acronyms and emoticons. During the last few years, both linguists and AI researchers have been compelled to deal with problems of context, syntax, semantics and pragmatics (Rosenberg, 1975). There are studies that address the issue of cooperation between linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) that focus on how chatbots communicate in writing with humans. However, this study is focused on humans, evaluating the language and distinguishing the linguistic characteristics used from the side of people conversing with a chatbot. The results showed that student-chatbot messages contained fewer words per message than those sent to another student, but students sent more than twice as many messages to the chatbot than to their peers. The study revealed that there is a higher level of motivation in students when they engage in conversations with the artificial agent vs other students.