Publikation
Building Common Ground in Dialogue: A Survey
Tatiana Anikina; Alina Leippert; Simon Ostermann
In: Proceedings of the Second LUHME Workshop. Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME-2025), located at ECAI-2025, October 26, Bologna, Italy, Association for Computational Linguistics, 10/2025.
Zusammenfassung
Common ground plays a crucial role in human communication since it helps to establish shared knowledge. However, common ground is also a heavily loaded term that may be interpreted in different ways depending on the context. The scope of common ground ranges from domain-specific and personal shared experiences to common sense knowledge. Representationally, common ground can be uni- or multi-modal, and static or dynamic. In this survey, we attempt to systematize different facets of common ground in dialogue and position it within the current landscape of NLP research that often relies on the usage of language models (LMs) and task-specific short-term interactions. We outline different dimensions of common ground and describe modeling approaches for several grounding tasks, discuss issues caused by the lack of common ground in human-LM interactions, and suggest future research directions. This survey serves as a roadmap of what to pay attention to when equipping a dialogue system with grounding capabilities and provides a summary of current research on grounding in dialogue, categorizing 448 papers and compiling a list of the available datasets.