@article{udagawa-aizawa-2021-maintaining,
    title = "Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments",
    author = "Udagawa, Takuma  and
      Aizawa, Akiko",
    editor = "Roark, Brian  and
      Nenkova, Ani",
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "9",
    year = "2021",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2021.tacl-1.59/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl_a_00409",
    pages = "995--1011",
    abstract = "Common 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."
}