Beyond the Illusion: LLMs and the Case for Pragmatic Cues in Conversation

DOI

Conversational agents are becoming increasingly adept at interacting with humans in a very natural manner. They incorporate subtle linguistic and paralinguistic cues: changes in tone and style, emotional expressions, or fillers like `mm-hm'. In human communication, such cues serve pragmatic functions that support mutual understanding and communicative success. This raises the question: do we want conversational agents to blindly mimic these cues, or can we use them more purposefully to serve a communicative function? We argue that the role of pragmatic cues in interaction with conversational user interfaces remains underexplored. A deeper understanding of how to strategically use them in appropriate contexts and their impact on human-machine interactions is crucial to enhance mutual understanding in conversations with artificial agents. Through this provocation, we propose a research agenda to spark discussion on how future research can address this.