Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX

Nan Li, Albert Gatt, Massimo Poesio


Abstract
In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information, participants coordinate their understanding through interaction. We ask whether gaze provides evidence about grounding across two such tasks. Working from discrete behavioral annotations, we map HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) and MUNDEX (Türk et al., 2023) into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. In both corpora, aligned reference interpretations (MapTask) and UND (understood) judgments (MUNDEX) are associated with more task-directed gaze and with less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions. The associations are clearest for the participant leading the task: in giver-produced references, and in explainer judgments, which also co-vary with the explainee’s gaze. In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, the speaker’s gaze entropy is lower at the mention where a previously non-aligned referent becomes aligned. The best gaze feature groups improve modestly over controls under grouped cross-validation: temporal features in MapTask and raw proportions in MUNDEX. Because effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, we treat gaze as one contributing cue to grounding, to be interpreted alongside task and dialogue context.
Anthology ID:
2026.mint-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Esam Ghaleb, Ece Takmaz, Diego Frassinelli, Bulat Khaertdinov, Raquel Fernández, Zerrin Yumak, Asli Ozyurek
Venues:
MINT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
175–190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nan Li, Albert Gatt, and Massimo Poesio. 2026. Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue, pages 175–190, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX (Li et al., MINT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mint-1.18.pdf