Modeling Grounding for Interactive Social Companions

Abstract

Grounding is an important process that underlies all human interaction. Hence, it is also crucial for social companions to interact naturally. Maintaining the common ground requires domain knowledge but has also numerous social aspects, such as attention, engagement and empathy. Integrating these aspects and their interplay with the dialog management in a computational interaction model is a complex task. We present a modeling approach overcoming this challenge and illustrate it based on some social companion applications.