A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications
This work addresses a key gap in natural language understanding for dialogue systems, though it is incremental as it focuses on annotation methods rather than new models or broad SOTA results.
The paper tackles the problem of interpreting communicative intents in dialogue by grounding them in world modalities, proposing a recipe for obtaining grounding annotations to address this understudied issue.
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.