Reading List: Common Ground Theory for Human-Robot Interaction

Compiled by Kristen Stubbs, last updated June 26, 2007

Below you will find a collection of resources related to the application of common ground theory to human-robot interaction (HRI). The papers range from psychology studies to applications of the theory to robotic systems. This isn't an exhaustive list, but it includes the papers that I have found the most helpful or that I think would be helpful to others. The complete bibliographic information for the resources listed here is provided in BibTeX format here. I will try to keep this page updated with resources as I find them.

If you want to start out with an example of what common ground theory looks like when it's applied to HRI, you might want to read my journal article:

Kristen Stubbs, Pamela Hinds, and David Wettergreen. Autonomy and common ground in human-robot interaction: A field study. IEEE Intelligent Systems, Special Issue on Interacting with Autonomy, 22(2):42--50, March--April 2007. (PDF)

Common Ground Theory and the Grounding Process

If you read just one paper, read:

Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan. Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, R. M. Levine, and S. D. Teasley, editors, Perspectives on socially shared cognition, pages 127--149. APA, 1991. (PDF)

A more detailed explanation of what common ground is can be found in Chapter 4 of:

Herbert H. Clark. Using Language. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

More details on the grounding process (mutual acceptance):

H. Clark and D. Wilkes-Gibbs. Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22(1):1--39, 1986. (PDF)

As novices and experts talk with each other while completing a task, they assess each other's level of expertise and adjust their descriptions accordingly.

Ellen A. Issacs and Herbert H. Clark. References in Conversation Between Experts and Novices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 116(1):26--37, 1987. (PDF)

Distributed Collaboration

The papers in this section involve one or more people who are collaborating although they are not physically present together.

A study of 6-person teams distributed across three continents. Cramton discusses five types of "failures of mutual knowledge."

Catherine Durnell Cramton. The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3):346--371, 2001. (PDF)

Study of a video teleconferencing system, some discussion of directional gaze cues.

Abigail J. Sellen. Speech patterns in video-mediated conversations. In Proceedings of the 1992 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 1992), pages 49--59. ACM, 1992. (PDF)

Study of a bicycle repair task involving situation awareness and conversational grounding. Sources of visual information.

Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, and Jane Siegel. Visual information as a conversational resource in colalborative physical tasks. Human-Computer Interaction, 18:13--49, 2003. (PDF preprint)

How visual information can make collaboration more efficient.

Darren Gergle, Robert E. Kraut, and Susan R. Fussell. Language effciency and visual technology: Minimizing collaborative eﬀort with visual information. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 23(4):491--517, December 2004. (PDF preprint)

Nonverbal Communication

How people monitor their addressees, including how they watch their partners and the areas around their partners.

Herbert H. Clark and Meredyth A. Krych. Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding. Journal of Memory and Language, 50:62--81, 2004. (PDF)

Other Theories of Communication

If you want to look at some of the alternatives to common ground theory, here is an excellent overview. Common ground itself is not set apart, but it is integrated throughout the last two theories.

R. M. Krauss and Susan R. Fussell. Social psychological models of interpersonal communication. In E. T. Higgins and A. Kruglanski, editors, Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, pages 655--701. Guilford Press, 1996. (PDF preprint)

Applications of CG Theory in HCI

Susan E. Brennan and Eric A. Hulteen. Interaction and feedback in a spoken language system: A theoretical framework. Knowledge-Based Systems, 8:143--151, 1995. (PDF)

Tim Paek and Eric Horvitz. Uncertainty, utility, and misunderstanding: A decision-theoretic perspective on grounding in conversational systems. In Psychological models of communication in collaborative systems: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, November 5-7, North Falmouth, Massachusetts, pages 85--92, 1999. (PDF)

Applications of CG Theory in HRI

This is one of the first papers which demonstrated that communication between people and robots is more effective when their common ground is greater:

Sara Kiesler. Fostering common ground in human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Robots and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pages 729--734, 2005. (Link to IEEE page)

Other work from Sara's group involving one-on-one interactions:

Aaron Powers, Adam D. I. Kramer, Shirlene Lim, Jean Kuo, S. Lee, and Sara Kiesler. Eliciting information from people with a gendered humanoid robot. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Robots and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pages 158--163, 2005. (PDF)

Cristen Torrey, Aaron Powers, Matthew Marge, Susan R. Fussell, and Sara Kiesler. Effects of adaptive robot dialogue on information exchange and social relations. In Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pages 126--133. ACM, March 2006. (PDF)

Robotic dialog systems which have been built using common ground theory:

Kerstin Severinson-Eklundh, Helge Huttenrauch, and Anders Green. Social and collaborative aspects of interaction with a service robot. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Special Issue on Socially Interactive Robots, 42(3-4), 2003. (PDF)

Shuyin Li, Britta Wrede, and Gerhard Sagerer. A computational model of multi-modal grounding. In Proceedings of the ACL SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialog, in conjunction with COLING/ACL 2006, pages 153--160. ACL Press, 2006. (PDF)

Applications of common ground theory to exploration robotics:

Kristen Stubbs, Pamela Hinds, and David Wettergreen. Challenges to grounding in human-robot interaction: Sources of errors and miscommunications in remote exploration robotics. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM, 2006. Awarded Best Poster. (PDF)

Kristen Stubbs, Pamela Hinds, and David Wettergreen. Challenges to grounding in human-robot collaboration: Errors and miscommunications in remote exploration robotics. Technical Report CMU-RI-TR-06-32, Carnegie Mellon University, July 2006. (PDF)