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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12370/

## 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 (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18105/) (2024)
- [The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08909/) (2015)
- [MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06275/) (2021)
- [Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02418/) (2024)
- [Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09144/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Robotic Language Grounding: Tradeoffs between Symbols and Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13245/) (2024)
- [Analyzing LLM Behavior in Dialogue Summarization: Unveiling Circumstantial Hallucination Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03487/) (2024)
- [MeetUp! A Corpus of Joint Activity Dialogues in a Visual Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05084/) (2019)
- [Natural Language Decompositions of Implicit Content Enable Better Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14583/) (2023)
- [Robots in the Middle: Evaluating LLMs in Dispute Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07053/) (2024)
- [Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17284/) (2024)
- [Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16609/) (2024)
- [Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17348/) (2025)
- [Finding Common Ground: Annotating and Predicting Common Ground in Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01273/) (2023)
- [The Spot the Difference corpus: a multi-modal corpus of spontaneous task oriented spoken interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05091/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19792/) (2026)
- [Sycophancy Undermines Epistemic Vigilance in Cooperative Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29585/) (2026)
- [LLMs and their Limited Theory of Mind: Evaluating Mental State Annotations in Situated Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02292/) (2025)
- [Illusion of Alignment: Detecting Hidden Disagreement in Collaborative Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08210/) (2026)

## 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.