Researchers develop a AI program with manners

A team of scientists has developed a technique that automatically makes written sentences more polite. Why it matters: As the authors themselves note in the paper, it is "imperative to use the appropriate level of politeness for smooth communication in conversations." And what better to determine the appropriate level of politeness than an unfeeling machine-learning algorithm? What's new: In a paper presented this week at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University analyzed a dataset of 1.39 million sentences, each of which was labeled with a politeness score. Of note: The researchers used the "Enron Corpus" as a dataset -- hundreds of thousands of emails exchanged by Enron employees and preserved by the federal government during its investigation of the now-defunct energy firm.