Polite but Misaligned: Evaluating LLM Politeness Judgments Against Human Pragmatic Norms

arXiv:2609.29001 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-24

Updated: 2026-09-24

Code: https://github.com/rong4ivy/llm-politeness

Terminology

• Alignment — 37× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Pragmatics — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 11× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Accuracy — 10× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 9× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• AI Alignment — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Scaffolding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Ablation study — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Analyzer — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotation Ambiguity — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Data Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• GRPO — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Sycophancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• Towards New Benchmark for AI Alignment & Sentiment Analysis in Socially Important Issues: A Comparative Study of Human and LLMs in the Context of AGI
• AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey
• Evaluating AI Alignment in LLMs: Output Analysis of Value Priorities Across 75 Models with Human Benchmarking
• Optimizing Safe and Aligned Language Generation: A Multi-Objective GRPO Approach
• Assessing Social Alignment: Do Personality-Prompted Large Language Models Behave Like Humans?

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