A recipe for annotating grounded clarifications

LUCIANA BENOTTI; PATRICK BLACKBURN

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Association for Computational Linguistics

Año: 2022; p. 4065 - 4077

In order to interpret the emph{communicative intents} of an utterance, it needs to be emph{grounded} in something that is emph{outside of language}; that is, emph{grounded} in emph{world modalities}. In this paper we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make explicit the process of interpreting the emph{communicative intents} of the speaker´s utterances by grounding them step-by-step in all the required 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 grand endeavour 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 draw attention to the many ethical issues that will need to be attended to in future work.