# Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09544 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09544/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09144/) (2023)
- [Grounding 'Grounding' in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02192/) (2021)
- [SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08295/) (2024)
- [Call for Customized Conversation: Customized Conversation Grounding Persona and Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08619/) (2021)
- [Navigating Rifts in Human-LLM Grounding: Study and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13975/) (2025)
- [RECAP: Retrieval-Enhanced Context-Aware Prefix Encoder for Personalized Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07206/) (2023)
- [Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09267/) (2022)
- [Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11790/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Storytelling with Human Actors and AI Narrators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14728/) (2021)
- [You Truly Understand What I Need: Intellectual and Friendly Dialogue Agents grounding Knowledge and Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02401/) (2023)
- [Speechworthy Instruction-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14672/) (2024)
- [FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10510/) (2021)
- [Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15067/) (2024)
- [Viola: A Topic Agnostic Generate-and-Rank Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11063/) (2021)
- [Tailoring Vaccine Messaging with Common-Ground Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10861/) (2024)
- [NewsInterview: a Dataset and a Playground to Evaluate LLMs' Ground Gap via Informational Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13779/) (2024)
- [Investigating Content Planning for Navigating Trade-offs in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02077/) (2024)
- [Designing and Evaluating Dialogue LLMs for Co-Creative Improvised Theatre](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07111/) (2024)
- [BotEval: Facilitating Interactive Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17770/) (2024)
- [Unstructured Text Enhanced Open-domain Dialogue System: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09166/) (2024)
- [Knowing the User Is Not Knowing What We Established: Grounding Awareness in Personal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective dialogue involves grounding, the process of establishing mutual knowledge that is essential for communication between people. Modern dialogue systems are not explicitly trained to build common ground, and therefore overlook this important aspect of communication. Improvisational theater (improv) intrinsically contains a high proportion of dialogue focused on building common ground, and makes use of the yes-and principle, a strong grounding speech act, to establish coherence and an actionable objective reality. We collect a corpus of more than 26,000 yes-and turns, transcribing them from improv dialogues and extracting them from larger, but more sparsely populated movie script dialogue corpora, via a bootstrapped classifier. We fine-tune chit-chat dialogue systems with our corpus to encourage more grounded, relevant conversation and confirm these findings with human evaluations.