An Annotated Corpus of Reference Resolution for Interpreting Common Grounding

Common grounding is the process of creating, repairing and updating mutual understandings, which is a fundamental aspect of natural language conversation. However, interpreting the process of common grounding is a challenging task, especially under continuous and partially-observable context where complex ambiguity, uncertainty, partial understandings and misunderstandings are introduced. Interpretation becomes even more challenging when we deal with dialogue systems which still have limited capability of natural language understanding and generation. To address this problem, we consider reference resolution as the central subtask of common grounding and propose a new resource to study its intermediate process. Based on a simple and general annotation schema, we collected a total of 40,172 referring expressions in 5,191 dialogues curated from an existing corpus, along with multiple judgements of referent interpretations. We show that our annotation is highly reliable, captures the complexity of common grounding through a natural degree of reasonable disagreements, and allows for more detailed and quantitative analyses of common grounding strategies. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of our annotation for interpreting, analyzing and improving common grounding in baseline dialogue systems.

How Do Partial Understandings Work?

Most understandings are massively incomplete, raising questions about how they could be of any use. This in turn leads to questions about the typical contents of partial understandings and whether they suggest a different account of what understandings are and how they are used not just by laypeople but even by experts. Whether they are scientists or young children, all people work with partial understandings and usually fail to realize just how partial those understandings are. It is not possible for any one mind to store all the details necessary to completely understand many phenomena. Yet those gaps may be surprisingly functional, especially given ways that young children cope with overwhelming causal content. Our partial understandings work through heuristics that enable us to use what we do know to appropriately defer and lock onto knowledge in other minds. Early exposure to mechanisms may provide a route to more abstract causal understandings, such as a system’s causal complexity, that endure when mechanistic details fade from memory. These abstract understandings may guide deference. Illusions of understanding may also result in useful restraints on storing details that are not really necessary given access to knowledge in other minds.

Knowing Subjects and Partial Understandings

Chapter 3 analyzes attempts to introduce and institutionalize tolerance as a liberal political virtue defined primarily in terms of accepting inconsequential ethnic and racial diversity in a polity built on consequential ethno-national difference. Many Latvians refused this civilizational lesson, partly because they considered that it did not address the fundamental issues of concern to them. This, in turn, prompted the tolerance workers to redefine the problem of intolerance as a problem of not recognizing the problem of intolerance. Thereafter, tolerance workers engaged in extensive efforts to convince the Latvian public of the existence of the problem of intolerance through a variety of diagnostic exercises, which not only identified the problem of intolerance, but also its causes, such as lack of critical thinking among Latvia’s residents.

Quick Reads: Another Good Idea: Toward a Definition of Reflection

“As students progress through the grades, the mathematics about which they communicate should become more complex and abstract. Students' repertoire of tools and ways of communicating, as well as the mathematical reasoning that supports their communication, should become increasingly sophisticated. Support for students is vital” (NCTM 2000, p. 60). Students often make comments that indicate partial understandings and misconceptions. With these comments in mind, a teacher can ask questions that scaffold the students' understanding. This article addresses the partial understandings and misconceptions that arise from using everyday language to describe the geometric concept of reflection.

Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism

There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.