Grounding 'Grounding' in NLP
This work addresses a conceptual problem for NLP researchers by clarifying terminology to potentially improve task design and alignment with cognitive principles, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper investigates the gap between how the NLP community and Cognitive Science define 'grounding', identifying missing aspects like coordination and constraints, and proposes ways to bridge this gap by creating or repurposing tasks.
The NLP community has seen substantial recent interest in grounding to facilitate interaction between language technologies and the world. However, as a community, we use the term broadly to reference any linking of text to data or non-textual modality. In contrast, Cognitive Science more formally defines "grounding" as the process of establishing what mutual information is required for successful communication between two interlocutors -- a definition which might implicitly capture the NLP usage but differs in intent and scope. We investigate the gap between these definitions and seek answers to the following questions: (1) What aspects of grounding are missing from NLP tasks? Here we present the dimensions of coordination, purviews and constraints. (2) How is the term "grounding" used in the current research? We study the trends in datasets, domains, and tasks introduced in recent NLP conferences. And finally, (3) How to advance our current definition to bridge the gap with Cognitive Science? We present ways to both create new tasks or repurpose existing ones to make advancements towards achieving a more complete sense of grounding.