Abstract:
All communication aims at achieving common ground (grounding):
interlocutors can work together effectively only with mutual beliefs about
what the state of the world is, about what their goals are, and about how they
plan to make their goals a reality. Computational dialogue research offers some
classic results on grouding, which unfortunately offer scant guidance to the
design of grounding modules and behaviors in cutting-edge systems. In this
tutorial, we focus on three main topic areas: 1) grounding in human-human
communication; 2) grounding in dialogue systems; and 3) grounding in
multi-modal interactive systems, including image-oriented conversations and
human-robot interactions. We highlight a number of achievements of recent
computational research in coordinating complex content, show how these results
lead to rich and challenging opportunities for doing grounding in more flexible
and powerful ways, and canvass relevant insights from the literature on
human-human conversation. We expect that the tutorial will be of interest to
researchers in dialogue systems, computational semantics and cognitive
modeling, and hope that it will catalyze research and system building that more
directly explores the creative, strategic ways conversational agents might be
able to seek and offer evidence about their understanding of their
interlocutors.