mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Understanding Common Ground Misalignment in Goal-Oriented Dialog: A Case-Study with Ubuntu Chat Logs

arXiv 2503.12370 ↗First posted 16 Mar 2025cs.CLcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

While it is commonly accepted that maintaining common ground plays a role in conversational success, little prior research exists connecting conversational grounding to success in task-oriented conversations. We study failures of grounding in the Ubuntu IRC dataset, where participants use text-only communication to resolve technical issues. We find that disruptions in conversational flow often stem from a misalignment in common ground, driven by a divergence in beliefs and assumptions held by participants. These disruptions, which we call conversational friction, significantly correlate with task success. We find that although LLMs can identify overt cases of conversational friction, they struggle with subtler and more context-dependent instances requiring pragmatic or domain-specific reasoning.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2025.

Builds on

17 of 40 references.

References · 17

  1. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  2. 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,307
  3. 2024Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlookcited by 188
  4. 2015The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systemscited by 172
  5. 2021MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Taskscited by 62
  6. 2024Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language modelscited by 54
  7. 2023Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generationscited by 47
  8. 2024Analyzing LLM Behavior in Dialogue Summarization: Unveiling Circumstantial Hallucination Trendscited by 25
  9. 2024A Survey of Robotic Language Grounding: Tradeoffs between Symbols and Embeddingscited by 24
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  11. 2023Natural Language Decompositions of Implicit Content Enable Better Text Representationscited by 19
  12. 2024Robots in the Middle: Evaluating LLMs in Dispute Resolutioncited by 14
5 more
  1. 2024Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialoguecited by 13
  2. 2024Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Unitscited by 9
  3. 2025Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systemscited by 7
  4. 2023Finding Common Ground: Annotating and Predicting Common Ground in Spoken Conversationscited by 6
  5. 2018The Spot the Difference corpus: a multi-modal corpus of spontaneous task oriented spoken interactionscited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 3.

4 papers.

  1. 2026LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communicationcited by 8
  2. 2026Sycophancy Undermines Epistemic Vigilance in Cooperative Vision-Language Taskscited by 2
  3. 2025LLMs and their Limited Theory of Mind: Evaluating Mental State Annotations in Situated Dialoguecited by 1
  4. 2026Illusion of Alignment: Detecting Hidden Disagreement in Collaborative Dialoguecited by 0