@inproceedings{ginn-etal-2026-first,
    title = "A First Step towards Dialog Simulation with Grounded Dialog Graphs",
    author = "Ginn, Michael  and
      Pauk, Matt  and
      Reese, Tava  and
      Gupta, Sameer  and
      Castellucci, Giuseppe  and
      Small, Kevin  and
      Moschitti, Alessandro  and
      Palmer, Derek  and
      Palmer, Martha  and
      Palmer, Alexis  and
      Pacheco, Maria",
    editor = "Braud, Chlo{\'e}  and
      Hardmeier, Christian  and
      Ogrodniczuk, Maciej  and
      Loaiciga, Sharid  and
      Zeldes, Amir  and
      Nov{\'a}k, Michal  and
      Li, Chuyuan  and
      Strube, Michael  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Joint Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences and Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference ({CODI}-{CRAC} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.codi-1.11/",
    pages = "78--108",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-400-2",
    abstract = "n this work, we propose a method for dialog simulation to gather high-quality open-domain, multi-turn question answering conversations. The simulation is grounded on Stack Exchange posts and motivated by computational discourse theory. We first convert forum posts into structured directed graphs; then, different traversals through the graph represent possible conversational trajectories. Our proposed graph traversal algorithm produces dialogs optimized for conversational efficiency. In addition, we propose an evaluation framework based on Gricean conversational maxims. Expert-level human annotators evaluate 105 cooking domain transcripts according to our framework; dialogs produced by our method receive ratings that are competitive with dialogs from prior work."
}