Incrementally Enriching the Common Ground: A Research Path (2023)

Abstract: I am broadly interested in evaluation of dialogue systems, in all its many facets: The data they are trained on, their ability to perform a task successfully, their skills with respect to various dialogue phenomena, their resemblance to human cognitive processes, and their ethical and societal impact. More specifically, my research topics focus on understanding the possibilities and limits of current multimodal neural network-based models to incrementally encode information for natural language understanding in general and also for building common ground and asking for clarification. Besides, I am interested in dialogue games as a means to elicit and collect dialogue data and to evaluate the abilities of dialogue models.

## spoken dialogue system (sds) research i do not dare trying to predict what the field of dialogue research will be in 5 to 10 years given the pace of the latest innovations. but i am convinced that evaluation is a cornerstone for model development and deployment, and that evaluation has to be much more than optimising metrics. we need evaluation for transparency, for policy making, for increasing the literacy and awareness of users interacting with sds. i strongly support that everyone involved in building sds continuously seek to sharpen their perspectives on our responsibility, as individuals and as a community, also beyond the technical and theoretical aspects. we need opportunities to promote and take part in dialogues on many urgent topics, for instance: the impact of these technologies in the world, the protection of vulnerable groups, the options for regulation, the mitigation of risks, the influence of commercial interests on research and on users, and the power concentration. i am interested in discussing what actions can or should be taken and what should we really be aiming for when building or evaluating sds.