https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/cmu-researchers-develop-a-an-automatic-politeness-engine-for-text-based-communications/

If you’re a typically terse communicator who could probably benefit from a little more civility in your everyday communications, a new Carnegie Mellon University research project could be the answer. A team at CMU created an automated way to improve the politeness of written requests and communications, which could have a number of potential applications – including eventually providing the basis for a sort of Grammarly but designed for writing tone instead of adherence to grammar rules.

The politeness transfer engine that the CMU research team (including Language Technology Institutes Ph.D student Shrimai Prabhumoye, as well as Master’s students Aman Madaan, Amrith Setlur and Tanmay Parekh) developed is based on similar style transfer mechanisms you may be more familiar with from photography AI projects, where software can apply the style of one photograph to any other. This project used a dataset of half a million emails exchanged by Enron employees, which were made public as part of legal proceedings against the company resulting from its corruption and fraud scandals.