Professional Communication in a Digitalizing Society

For example, we investigate how artificial intelligence (e.g. machine translations and chatbots) can be used effectively to improve the communication of organizations with their stakeholders. In addition, we develop research-based digital tools that can help students and professionals improve their communicative competences. Three key concepts guide our research:

• Digitalization: Digital communication plays a prominent role in our professional lives, and developments in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing make it easier to have messages processed or created by computers. Our research helps students, professionals and organizations improve their professional communication through the optimal use of digital tools, both during the learning process and during the actual interaction with stakeholders.
• Multilingualism: When communicating in a language that is not your mother tongue, it is extra challenging to create high-quality, meaningful interactions. That is why we pay special attention to digital tools that can be used to support multilingual professional communication.
• Relational perspective: Digital communication is often experienced as ‘volatile’ or ‘less personal’. Therefore, we think it is important to place the relational perspective at the heart of our research. In our view, an interaction is only successful if it produces positive effects for all stakeholders in the long run. In our research, we focus on relational variables such as trust, satisfaction and loyalty.

Projects

The research agenda of Professional Communication in a Digitalizing Society builds on various projects that were initiated and implemented in recent years and that were related to the use of artificial intelligence (e.g. chatbots or machine translation) in professional communication. As a result, three major lines of research have emerged. These are described below according to the main questions they try to answer.

1) How can the communicative competence of conversational agents be enhanced?

What seemed impossible a few years ago has now become reality in more and more places: chatbots, avatars or robots that interact with customers, guests or citizens on behalf of an organization. Users do not always experience conversations with such agents as positive, which is partly because the current generation of agents makes little use of the communication skills that human employees routinely use during interactions with stakeholders. The aim of this line of research is to enhance the communicative competence of conversational agents, so that interactions with such agents contribute positively to the relationships between organizations and their stakeholders. To do this, we need to know (1) what users want and expect when they engage in conversation with a conversational agent, and (2) which effects the use of communication skills by conversational agents has on user satisfaction.

2) When is professional communication fit-for-purpose?

From the perspective of language proficiency, professional communication is often suboptimal: it contains language errors, clumsy stylistic choices or an illogical message structure. This is not necessarily a problem for end users, because a suboptimal message can still be fit-for-purpose, in the sense that it enables recipients to learn what they need to learn or to do what they need to do. For example, previous research has shown that in professional contexts, native speakers are tolerant of language errors made by non-native speakers, provided that they do not compromise successful completion of the transaction. It has also been shown that machine translated texts are perfectly usable in certain contexts. At the same time, situations are conceivable in which the sender does not have to invest less, but rather more effort to meet the wishes and needs of the end user. The aim of this line of research is to find out when professional communication is fit-for-purpose from the perspective of the end user.

3) Which didactic innovations can help students improve their communicative competences?

In view of the core concepts in our profile and our close ties with study programs in which communicative competences play an important role, we also do research into innovative didactics in this area. We want students to feel comfortable when communicating with others, even when they are not using their native language. In addition, we want them to be able to reflect on previous interactions or experiences to further sharpen their communicative competences. In practice, many students find it difficult to apply newly learned skills (e.g., in a foreign language), and their ability to translate experiences from previous interactions into new strategies for the future is limited. Part of the solution to this problem lies in improving didactics. Within this line of research we want to identify innovative educational interventions for teaching communication skills. In order to do this, we mainly look at the use of digital tools, such as virtual learning environments, blog platforms and machine translation.