Collaborative Effort towards Common Ground in Situated Human-Robot Dialogue

In situated human-robot dialogue, although humans and robots are co-present in a shared environment, they have significantly mismatched capabilities in perceiving the shared environment. Their representations of the shared world are misaligned. In order for humans and robots to communicate with each other successfully using language, it is important for them to mediate such differences and to establish common ground. To address this issue, this paper describes a dialogue system that aims to mediate a shared perceptual basis during human-robot dialogue. In particular, we present an empirical study that examines the role of the robot’s collaborative effort and the performance of natural language processing modules in dialogue grounding. Our empirical results indicate that in situated human-robot dialogue, a low collaborative effort from the robot may lead its human partner to believe a common ground is established. However, such beliefs may not reflect true mutual understanding. To support truly grounded dialogues, the robot should make an extra effort by making its partner aware of its internal representation of the shared world.