Envisioning conversation: toward understanding and augmenting common ground

Abstract

Our intellectual life draws on daily conversations that allow us to communicate thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc. To conduct smooth and reliable interactions, participants need to share a solid basis of common ground prior to conversation, which consists of knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions regarding the topics to discuss. Importance of common ground applies to artificial agents as well. A capability of jointly building and maintaining the common ground with people on the fly is indispensable to establish a productive relationship. Understanding and augmenting common ground is challenging, as it is both tacit and dynamic in the sense that the common ground for a situation contains plenty of tacit dimensions and it is dynamically updated as the interaction proceeds.