Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX
Cross-corpus analysis finds gaze patterns modestly correlate with grounding alignment in the MapTask and MUNDEX dialogue corpora.
Researchers mapped HCRC MapTask and MUNDEX annotations into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and computed gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. Aligned reference interpretations and understood judgments co-occur with more task-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer transitions, clearest for task-leading participants. Effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, so gaze is treated as one contributing cue to grounding.
- Analyzes HCRC MapTask and MUNDEX corpora for gaze-grounding links
- Aligned references associate with lower gaze entropy and fewer transitions
- Effects are clearest for task-leading participants
- Best gaze feature groups improve only modestly under grouped cross-validation
- Several effects weaken when recurring participants are the unit of inference
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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.
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