[2601.09365] Frame of Reference: Addressing the Challenges of Common Ground Representation in Situational Dialogs

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2601.09365 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Jan 2026 (v1), last revised 7 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Frame of Reference: Addressing the Challenges of Common Ground Representation in Situational Dialogs Authors:Biswesh Mohapatra, Théo Charlot, Giovanni Duca, Mayank Palan, Laurent Romary, Justine Cassell View a PDF of the paper titled Frame of Reference: Addressing the Challenges of Common Ground Representation in Situational Dialogs, by Biswesh Mohapatra and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Common ground plays a critical role in situated spoken dialogs, where interlocutors must establish and maintain shared references to entities, events, and relations to sustain coherent interaction in a shared space and over time. With the increasing presence of embodied conversational agents and social robots, the ability to correctly ground this kind of conversational content in order to refer back later also becomes important for dialog systems. Prior studies have demonstrated that LLMs are capable of performing certain grounding acts like acknowledgments. However, relatively little work has investigated their capacity to leverage the grounded information, like in complex scenarios involving space and time (e.g., "let's go to that café near the park we went to yesterday"). To that end, in this work, we evaluate a model's ability to establish common ground by utilizing these "relational references" in the dynamic and sh...