  Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by
developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism may be
inevitable due to the choice of medium, conscious and unconscious design
choices can guide users to personify such systems to varying degrees.
Encouraging users to relate to automated systems as if they were human can lead
to high risk scenarios caused by over-reliance on their outputs. As a result,
natural language processing researchers have investigated the 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 explored. In this paper, we discuss the linguistic factors that contribute
to the anthropomorphism of dialogue systems and the harms that can arise,
including reinforcing gender stereotypes 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.
