A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of grounded clarifications in dialogue for interpreting speaker intent, proposing a method for annotation and discussing associated challenges and ethical considerations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel recipe for annotating grounded clarifications, framing it as a crucial yet understudied aspect of natural language understanding.

Findings

Proposes a systematic approach for grounding annotations in dialogue

Highlights practical challenges in implementing clarification mechanisms

Discusses ethical issues related to grounding in dialogue systems

Abstract

In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the communicative intents of the speaker's utterances by grounding them in the various modalities in which the dialogue is situated. This paper frames dialogue clarification mechanisms as an understudied research problem and a key missing piece in the giant jigsaw puzzle of natural language understanding. We discuss both the theoretical background and practical challenges posed by this problem and propose a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations. We conclude by highlighting ethical issues that need to be addressed in future work.