Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask

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Authors: Nan Li, Albert Gatt, Massimo Poesio
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Abstract

Collaborative dialogue relies on participants incrementally establishing common ground, yet in asymmetric settings they may believe they agree while referring to different entities. We introduce a perspectivist annotation scheme for the HCRC MapTask corpus (Anderson et al., 1991) that separately captures speaker and addressee grounded interpretations for each reference expression, enabling us to trace how understanding emerges, diverges, and repairs over time. Using a scheme-constrained LLM annotation pipeline, we obtain 13k annotated reference expressions with reliability estimates and analyze the resulting understanding states. The results show that full misunderstandings are rare once lexical variants are unified, but multiplicity discrepancies systematically induce divergences, revealing how apparent grounding can mask referential misalignment. Our framework provides both a resource and an analytic lens for studying grounded misunderstanding and for evaluating (V)LLMs' capacity to model perspective-dependent grounding in collaborative dialogue.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech and dialogue systems Topic Modeling Natural Language Processing Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Publisher
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages
4988–5001
Publication date
30 April 2026