Understanding Common Ground Misalignment in Goal-Oriented Dialog: A Case-Study with Ubuntu Chat Logs
Rupak Sarkar, Neha Srikanth, Taylor Pellegrin, Rachel Rudinger, Claire Bonial, Philip Resnik
Abstract
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. While LLMs can identify overt cases of conversational friction, they struggle with subtler and more context-dependent instances that require pragmatic or domain-specific reasoning.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sarkar-etal-2025-understanding,
title = "Understanding Common Ground Misalignment in Goal-Oriented Dialog: A Case-Study with {U}buntu Chat Logs",
author = "Sarkar, Rupak and
Srikanth, Neha and
Pellegrin, Taylor and
Rudinger, Rachel and
Bonial, Claire and
Resnik, Philip",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.161/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.161",
pages = "3200--3215",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}