Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism is inevitable, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide users to personify them to varying degrees. Encouraging users to relate to automated systems as if they were human can lead to transparency and trust issues, and high risk scenarios caused by over-reliance on their outputs. As a result, natural language processing researchers have begun to investigate factors that induce personification and develop resources to mitigate such effects. However, these efforts are fragmented, and many aspects of anthropomorphism have yet to be considered. In this paper, we discuss the linguistic factors that contribute to the anthropomorphism of dialogue systems and the harms that can arise, arguing that it can reinforce stereotypes of gender roles and notions of acceptable language. We recommend that future efforts towards developing dialogue systems take particular care in their design, development, release, and description; and attend to the many linguistic cues that can elicit personification by users.

翻译：自动化对话或会话系统被开发者拟人化，也被用户赋予人格特征。尽管一定程度的拟人化不可避免，但有意识或无意识的设计选择会引导用户产生不同程度的拟人化认知。鼓励用户将自动化系统视为人类对待可能导致透明度与信任问题，并因过度依赖系统输出而引发高风险场景。因此，自然语言处理研究者已开始探索诱发拟人化的因素，并开发相关资源以缓解此类影响。然而，这些努力仍较为分散，拟人化的诸多方面尚未得到充分考量。本文探讨了导致对话系统拟人化的语言因素及其可能引发的危害，论证其会强化性别角色刻板印象和语言可接受性的固有观念。我们建议，未来对话系统的开发应在设计、研发、发布与描述环节中特别注意，并关注那些可能引发用户拟人化认知的多重语言线索。