@inproceedings{kim-etal-2026-read,
    title = "Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts",
    author = "Kim, Jaehee  and
      Chung, Ji Hoon  and
      Park, Seoyoon  and
      Kim, Unsol  and
      Park, Kyungwon  and
      Kim, JiHak  and
      Chen, Yi-Jun  and
      Kim, Hansaem",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1556/",
    pages = "31109--31124",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks largely overlook this requirement, focusing instead on explicitly encoded context or perceptual recognition, and thus underexplore context-dependent pragmatic understanding{---}particularly in high-context languages such as Korean. We introduce READI, a multimodal benchmark for evaluating ISA understanding through integrated reasoning over visual context and dialogue. READI models graded indirectness grounded in pragmatic theory and formulates the task as vision-based pragmatic question answering (V-PQA), supporting cross-lingual evaluation in English and Korean. Experiments show that even state-of-the-art multimodal models struggle with visually grounded indirect speech acts, with performance declining as indirectness increases, underscoring the need for benchmarks that explicitly target contextual pragmatic reasoning."
}