Collaborative dialogue relies on participants incrementally establishing common ground, yet in asymmetric settings they may believe they agree while referring to different entities. We introduce a perspectivist annotation scheme for the HCRC MapTask corpus (Anderson et al., 1991) that separately captures speaker and addressee grounded interpretations for each reference expression, enabling us to trace how understanding emerges, diverges, and repairs over time. Using a scheme-constrained LLM annotation pipeline, we obtain 13k annotated reference expressions with reliability estimates and analyze the resulting understanding states. The results show that full misunderstandings are rare once lexical variants are unified, but multiplicity discrepancies systematically induce divergences, revealing how apparent grounding can mask referential misalignment. Our framework provides both a resource and an analytic lens for studying grounded misunderstanding and for evaluating (V)LLMs' capacity to model perspective-dependent grounding in collaborative dialogue.

Arabic Rhetoric is the field of Arabic linguistics which governs the art and science of conveying a message with greater beauty, impact and persuasiveness. The field is as ancient as the Arabic language itself and is found extensively in classical and contemporary Arabic poetry, free verse and prose. In practical terms, it is the intelligent use of word order, figurative speech and linguistic embellishments to enhance message delivery. Despite the volumes that have been written about it and the high status accorded to it, there is no way to objectively know whether a speaker or writer has used Arabic rhetoric in a given text, to what extent, and why. There is no objective way to compare the use of Arabic rhetoric across genres, authors or epochs. It is impossible to know which of pre-Islamic poetry, Andalucian Arabic poetry, or modern literary genres are richer in Arabic rhetoric. The aim of the current study was to devise a way to measure the density of the literary devices which constitute Arabic rhetoric in a given text, as a proxy marker for Arabic rhetoric itself. A comprehensive list of 84 of the commonest literary devices and their definitions was compiled. A system of identifying literary devices in texts was constructed. A method of calculating the density of literary devices based on the morpheme count of the text was utilised. Four electronic tools and an analogue tool were created to support the calculation of an Arabic text's rhetorical literary device density, including a website and online calculator. Additionally, a technique of reporting the distribution of literary devices used across the three sub-domains of Arabic rhetoric was created. The output of this project is a working tool which can accurately report the density of Arabic rhetoric in any Arabic text or speech.

Handling multi-party dialogues represents a significant step for advancing spoken dialogue systems, necessitating the development of tasks specific to multi-party interactions. To address this challenge, we are constructing a multi-modal multi-party dialogue corpus of triadic (three-participant) discussions. This paper focuses on the task of addressee recognition, identifying who is being addressed to take the next turn, a critical component unique to multi-party dialogue systems. A subset of the corpus was annotated with addressee information, revealing that explicit addressees are indicated in approximately 20% of conversational turns. To evaluate the task's complexity, we benchmarked the performance of a large language model (GPT-4o) on addressee recognition. The results showed that GPT-4o achieved an accuracy only marginally above chance, underscoring the challenges of addressee recognition in multi-party dialogue. These findings highlight the need for further research to enhance the capabilities of large language models in understanding and navigating the intricacies of multi-party conversational dynamics.

Assessing the performance of systems to classify Multi-Party Conversations (MPC) is challenging due to the interconnection between linguistic and structural characteristics of conversations. Conventional evaluation methods often overlook variances in model behavior across different levels of structural complexity on interaction graphs. In this work, we propose a methodological pipeline to investigate model performance across specific structural attributes of conversations. As a proof of concept we focus on Response Selection and Addressee Recognition tasks, to diagnose model weaknesses. To this end, we extract representative diagnostic subdatasets with a fixed number of users and a good structural variety from a large and open corpus of online MPCs. We further frame our work in terms of data minimization, avoiding the use of original usernames to preserve privacy, and propose alternatives to using original text messages. Results show that response selection relies more on the textual content of conversations, while addressee recognition requires capturing their structural dimension. Using an LLM in a zero-shot setting, we further highlight how sensitivity to prompt variations is task-dependent.

Quotations in literary works, especially novels, are important to create characters, reflect character relationships, and drive plot development. Current research on quotation extraction in novels primarily focuses on quotation attribution, i.e., identifying the speaker of the quotation. However, the addressee of the quotation is also important to construct the relationship between the speaker and the addressee. To tackle the problem of dataset scarcity, we annotate the first Chinese quotation corpus with elements including speaker, addressee, speaking mode and linguistic cue. We propose prompt learning-based methods for speaker and addressee identification based on fine-tuned pre-trained models. Experiments on both Chinese and English datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed methods, which outperform methods based on zero-shot and few-shot large language models.

Hedges allow speakers to mark utterances as provisional, whether to signal non-prototypicality or "fuzziness", to indicate a lack of commitment to an utterance, to attribute responsibility for a statement to someone else, to invite input from a partner, or to soften critical feedback in the service of face-management needs. Here we focus on hedges in an experimentally parameterized corpus of 63 Roadrunner cartoon narratives spontaneously produced from memory by 21 speakers for co-present addressees, transcribed to text (Galati and Brennan, 2010). We created a gold standard of hedges annotated by human coders (the Roadrunner-Hedge corpus) and compared three LLM-based approaches for hedge detection: fine-tuning BERT, and zero and few-shot prompting with GPT-4o and LLaMA-3. The best-performing approach was a fine-tuned BERT model, followed by few-shot GPT-4o. After an error analysis on the top performing approaches, we used an LLM-in-the-Loop approach to improve the gold standard coding, as well as to highlight cases in which hedges are ambiguous in linguistically interesting ways that will guide future research. This is the first step in our research program to train LLMs to interpret and generate collateral signals appropriately and meaningfully in conversation.

We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.

The addressee estimation (understanding to whom somebody is talking) is a fundamental task for human activity recognition in multi-party conversation scenarios. Specifically, in the field of human-robot interaction, it becomes even more crucial to enable social robots to participate in such interactive contexts. However, it is usually implemented as a binary classification task, restricting the robot's capability to estimate whether it was addressed and limiting its interactive skills. For a social robot to gain the trust of humans, it is also important to manifest a certain level of transparency and explainability. Explainable artificial intelligence thus plays a significant role in the current machine learning applications and models, to provide explanations for their decisions besides excellent performance. In our work, we a) present an addressee estimation model with improved performance in comparison with the previous SOTA; b) further modify this model to include inherently explainable attention-based segments; c) implement the explainable addressee estimation as part of a modular cognitive architecture for multi-party conversation in an iCub robot; d) propose several ways to incorporate explainability and transparency in the aforementioned architecture; and e) perform a pilot user study to analyze the effect of various explanations on how human participants perceive the robot.

Extracting who says what to whom is a crucial part in analyzing human communication in today's abundance of data such as online news articles. Yet, the lack of annotated data for this task in German news articles severely limits the quality and usability of possible systems. To remedy this, we present a new, freely available, creative-commons-licensed dataset for quotation attribution in German news articles based on WIKINEWS. The dataset provides curated, high-quality annotations across 1000 documents (250,000 tokens) in a fine-grained annotation schema enabling various downstream uses for the dataset. The annotations not only specify who said what but also how, in which context, to whom and define the type of quotation. We specify our annotation schema, describe the creation of the dataset and provide a quantitative analysis. Further, we describe suitable evaluation metrics, apply two existing systems for quotation attribution, discuss their results to evaluate the utility of our dataset and outline use cases of our dataset in downstream tasks.

Aiming at implementing AE skills in robots to let them Focusing on the perceptual domain, i.e., a passive agent interact in unstructured scenarios, this paper 1) describes the listening to humans, the artificial agents must be able to development of an AE deep-learning model trained on humanrobot detect voices (Sound Detection and Voice Recognition), recognize interaction (HRI) dataset, as already described in [16], 2) who is talking (Speaker Recognition and Speaker illustrates its first deployment on the humanoid robot iCub, and Localization), and what they are saying (Natural Language 3) reports the results of an HRI pilot experiment to evaluate Understanding). But even considering optimal performances in the performance of the model deployed on the iCub compared all these tasks, an artificial agent endowed with such abilities to previous tests made on the training dataset.