Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments

AbstractCommon grounding is the process of creating and maintaining mutual understandings, which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication. While various task settings have been proposed in existing literature, they mostly focus on creating common ground under a stati...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Takuma Udagawa, Akiko Aizawa
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: The MIT Press 2021-01-01
Series:Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Online Access:https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00409/107278/Maintaining-Common-Ground-in-Dynamic-Environments
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Summary:AbstractCommon grounding is the process of creating and maintaining mutual understandings, which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication. While various task settings have been proposed in existing literature, they mostly focus on creating common ground under a static context and ignore the aspect of maintaining them overtime under dynamic context. In this work, we propose a novel task setting to study the ability of both creating and maintaining common ground in dynamic environments. Based on our minimal task formulation, we collected a large-scale dataset of 5,617 dialogues to enable fine-grained evaluation and analysis of various dialogue systems. Through our dataset analyses, we highlight novel challenges introduced in our setting, such as the usage of complex spatio-temporal expressions to create and maintain common ground. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to assess the capabilities of our baseline dialogue system and discuss future prospects of our research.
ISSN:2307-387X