Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units
Biswesh Mohapatra, Seemab Hassan, Laurent Romary, Justine Cassell
Abstract
Successful conversations often rest on common understanding, where all parties are on the same page about the information being shared. This process, known as conversational grounding, is crucial for building trustworthy dialog systems that can accurately keep track of and recall the shared information. The proficiencies of an agent in grounding the conveyed information significantly contribute to building a reliable dialog system. Despite recent advancements in dialog systems, there exists a noticeable deficit in their grounding capabilities. Traum (Traum, 1995) provided a framework for conversational grounding introducing Grounding Acts and Grounding Units, but substantial progress, especially in the realm of Large Language Models, remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present the annotation of two dialog corpora employing Grounding Acts, Grounding Units, and a measure of their degree of grounding. We discuss our key findings during the annotation and also provide a baseline model to test the performance of current Language Models in categorizing the grounding acts of the dialogs. Our work aims to provide a useful resource for further research in making conversations with machines better understood and more reliable in natural day-to-day collaborative dialogs.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.352
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3967–3977
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.352
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Biswesh Mohapatra, Seemab Hassan, Laurent Romary, and Justine Cassell. 2024. Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3967–3977, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units (Mohapatra et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.352.pdf