A Speculative and Tentative Common Ground Handling for Efficient Composition of Uncertain Dialogue

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3150–3157 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3150 A Speculative and Tentative Common Ground Handling for Efficient Composition of Uncertain Dialogue Saki Sudo1, Kyoshiro Asano1, Koh Mitsuda2, Ryuichiro Higashinaka2, and Yugo Takeuchi1 1Shizuoka University: Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 4328011, Japan 2NTT Corporation: Yokosuka, Kanagawa 2390847, Japan sudo.saki.16@shizuoka.ac.jp, asano.kyoshiro.16@shizuoka.ac.jp, koh.mitsuda.td@hco.ntt.co.jp, ryuichiro.higashinaka.tp@hco.ntt.co.jp, takeuchi@inf.shizuoka.ac.jp Abstract This study investigates how the grounding process is composed and explores new interaction approaches that adapt to human cognitive processes that have not yet been significantly studied. The results of an experiment indicate that grounding through dialogue is mutually accepted among participants through holistic expressions and suggest that common ground among participants may not necessarily be formed in a bottom-up way through analytic expressions. These findings raise the possibility of a promising new approach to creating a human-like dialogue system that may be more suitable for natural human communication. Keywords: common ground, analytic, holistic, data collection 1. Introduction Common ground in dialogue is a set of information shared among participants that serves as a precondition for understanding individual utterances in dialogue with others. In other words, it is the basis of a common understanding in which the participants can grasp what is being said without needing excessively detailed explanation (Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Clark & Brennan, 1991). Moreover, Stalnaker (1978) roughly described common ground as follows: “the presuppositions of a speaker are the propositions whose truth he takes for granted as part of the background of the conversation… Presuppositions are what is taken by the speaker to be the COMMON GROUND of the participants in the conversation, what is treated as their common knowledge or mutual knowledge.” When engaging in dialogue with others, people try to understand what the speaker is thinking and what they are saying or doing. In this way, it becomes easier to implicitly understand the meaning of the other’s thoughts, words, and actions without having the other person explain the specific target of instructions, statements about ideas, or the intentions of actions taken. Thus, for example, when two people who have worked together for a long time at a specific worksite discuss instructions about the work, we generally observe a dialogue with extremely simplified utterances that a third person could not understand. In such cases, indicative words such as “that,” “this,” and “it” are often used. Even if the specific object they refer to is not explicitly indicated, the work can be carried out smoothly without additional inquiry because they have established the belief that the object they refer to is the same thing/issue (Clark & Carlson, 1982). This belief arises from common ground between the participants that has been acquired through years of trial and error. Clark and Schaefer consider dialogue a cooperative work process by participants toward a goal, and they explained the degree of establishing common ground through their “contribution model” (Clark & Schaefer, 1989). The contribution model has two stages, presentation and …

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