Bridging Talk and Thought: Understanding Dialogue Dynamics Across Collaborative Problem-Solving Contexts

Zhengyuan Liu, Stella Yin, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy Chen


Abstract
We present a conceptual framework for analyzing dialogue in collaborative problem-solving contexts, with an emphasis on the emerging dynamics of human-AI and multi-agent collaboration. As intelligent systems become active agents capable of autonomous reasoning and strategic cooperation, understanding the dialogic interaction during collaborative problem solving is increasingly important for optimizing and evaluating such partnerships. Our framework addresses key limitations in current analytical approaches through a hierarchical two-layer coding scheme that integrates cognitive and non-cognitive problem solving with metacognitive regulatory mechanisms. We demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability across nine datasets spanning multiple domains, and provide insights into how humans and agents coordinate their knowledge, skills, and efforts to solve complex problems, showing in particular that metacognitive regulation can be an essential discriminator of deeper collaboration.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigdial-1.48
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2026
Address:
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Editors:
Jinho D. Choi, Yun-Nung Chen, Kotaro Funakoshi, Ali Emami
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
680–693
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.48/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengyuan Liu, Stella Yin, Min-Yen Kan, and Nancy Chen. 2026. Bridging Talk and Thought: Understanding Dialogue Dynamics Across Collaborative Problem-Solving Contexts. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 680–693, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Talk and Thought: Understanding Dialogue Dynamics Across Collaborative Problem-Solving Contexts (Liu et al., SIGDIAL 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.48.pdf