NEWS

Congratulations to Dr. Biswesh!

We warmly congratulate Biswesh Mohapatra on the successful defense of his PhD thesis on Friday, 10 July. This is a wonderful achievement, and we wish him every success in the next stage of his research career.

Congratulations from everyone at the lab!

This thesis focused on conversational grounding: how people establish, maintain, and repair shared understanding during interaction, and how conversational agents can be designed to maintain this shared context and refer back to the established common ground reliably as a dialogue unfolds. It introduced methods, benchmarks, and training approaches to help conversational agents track and update shared information over time, evaluate whether information has truly been grounded, and retrieve the appropriate conversational references when generating responses.

This work thus led to several publications:
“Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units.” In Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024.
“Evaluating the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Establishing Conversational Grounding.” In Proceedings of EMNLP 2024.
“Frame of Reference: Addressing the Challenges of Common Ground Representation in Situational Dialogs.” In Findings of ACL 2026.
“Using Machine Mental Imagery for Representing Common Ground in Situated Dialogue.” Under review at ICMI.