Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask

Nan Li, Albert Gatt, Massimo Poesio


Abstract
Collaborative dialogue relies on participants incrementally establishing common ground, yet in asymmetric settings they may believe they agree while referring to different entities. We introduce a perspectivist annotation scheme for the HCRC MapTask corpus (Anderson et al., 1991) that separately captures speaker and addressee grounded interpretations for each reference expression, enabling us to trace how understanding emerges, diverges, and repairs over time. Using a scheme-constrained LLM annotation pipeline, we obtain 13k annotated reference expressions with reliability estimates and analyze the resulting understanding states. The results show that full misunderstandings are rare once lexical variants are unified, but multiplicity discrepancies systematically induce divergences, revealing how apparent grounding can mask referential misalignment. Our framework provides both a resource and an analytic lens for studying grounded misunderstanding and for evaluating (V)LLMs’ capacity to model perspective-dependent grounding in collaborative dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.392
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
4988–5001
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.392/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nan Li, Albert Gatt, and Massimo Poesio. 2026. Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:4988–5001.
Cite (Informal):
Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask (Li et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.392.pdf