Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments

Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments Takuma Udagawa1 and Akiko Aizawa1,2 The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan1 National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan2 {takuma udagawa,aizawa}@nii.ac.jp Abstract Common grounding is the process of creat- ing and maintaining mutual understandings, which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication. While various task set- tings 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 for- mulation, we collected a large-scale dataset of 5,617 dialogues to enable fine-grained evalua- tion 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 experi- ments to assess the capabilities of our baseline dialogue system and discuss future prospects of our research. 1 Introduction Common grounding is the process of creating, repairing, and updating mutual understandings (i.e., common ground), which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication (Clark, 1996). Humans can create substantial common ground by expressing various information in nat- ural language, which can be clarified or repaired to resolve misunderstandings at essential levels of detail. Furthermore, as the situation changes and relevant information gets outdated, humans can update their common ground accordingly by discarding old information and acquiring new ones. Such ability plays a vital role in sustain- ing collaborative relationships and adapting to emerging problems in nonstationary, real-world environments. However, despite the wide variety of tasks pro- posed in existing literature (Fang et al., 2015; Zarrieß et al., 2016; De Vries et al., 2017; Udagawa and Aizawa, 2019; Haber et al., 2019), they mostly focus on creating common ground under static (time-invariant) context and ignore their dynamic aspects. While some recent dia- logue tasks deal with dynamic information, they often lack suitable evaluation metrics (Pasunuru and Bansal, 2018), context updates in the course of the dialogue (Alamri et al., 2019), or diverse dynamics of the environment itself (De Vries et al., 2018; Suhr et al., 2019; Narayan-Chen et al., 2019; Thomason et al., 2019; Moon et al., 2020). Therefore, it remains unclear how well existing dialogue systems can adapt to the diversely chang- ing situations through advanced common ground- ing (§2). To address this problem, we propose a novel dialogue task based on three design choices (§3): First, we formulate a novel sequential collabo- rative reference task as a temporal generalization of the collaborative reference task proposed in He et al. (2017) and Udagawa and Aizawa (2019). In our formulation, the goal of the agents is gener- alized to track and select the common entity at multiple timesteps, while the agents’ observations change dynamically between each timestep. This setting requires both creation and maintenance of common ground, while enabling clear evaluation …

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