The Role of Common Ground for Referential Expressions in Social Dialogues

Jaap Kruijt, Piek Vossen


Abstract
In this paper, we frame the problem of co-reference resolution in dialogue as a dynamic social process in which mentions to people previously known and newly introduced are mixed when people know each other well. We restructured an existing data set for the Friends sitcom as a coreference task that evolves over time, where close friends make reference to other people either part of their common ground (inner circle) or not (outer circle). We expect that awareness of common ground is key in social dialogue in order to resolve references to the inner social circle, whereas local contextual information plays a more important role for outer circle mentions. Our analysis of these references confirms that there are differences in naming and introducing these people. We also experimented with the SpanBERT coreference system with and without fine-tuning to measure whether preceding discourse contexts matter for resolving inner and outer circle mentions. Our results show that more inner circle mentions lead to a decrease in model performance, and that fine-tuning on preceding contexts reduces false negatives for both inner and outer circle mentions but increases the false positives as well, showing that the models overfit on these contexts.
Anthology ID:
2022.crac-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Sameer Pradhan, Anna Nedoluzhko, Vincent Ng, Massimo Poesio
Venue:
CRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
99–110
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.crac-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaap Kruijt and Piek Vossen. 2022. The Role of Common Ground for Referential Expressions in Social Dialogues. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 99–110, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Role of Common Ground for Referential Expressions in Social Dialogues (Kruijt & Vossen, CRAC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.crac-1.10.pdf
Code
 cltl/inner-outer-coreference