{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/what-are-you-referring-to-evaluating-the","title":"'What are you referring to?' Evaluating the Ability of Multi-Modal Dialogue Models to Process Clarificational Exchanges","arxiv_id":"2307.15554","date":"2023-07-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Javier Chiyah-Garcia","Alessandro Suglia","Arash Eshghi","Helen Hastie"],"abstract":"Referential ambiguities arise in dialogue when a referring expression does not uniquely identify the intended referent for the addressee. Addressees usually detect such ambiguities immediately and work with the speaker to repair it using meta-communicative, Clarificational Exchanges (CE): a Clarification Request (CR) and a response. Here, we argue that the ability to generate and respond to CRs imposes specific constraints on the architecture and objective functions of multi-modal, visually grounded dialogue models. We use the SIMMC 2.0 dataset to evaluate the ability of different state-of-the-art model architectures to process CEs, with a metric that probes the contextual updates that arise from them in the model. We find that language-based models are able to encode simple multi-modal semantic information and process some CEs, excelling with those related to the dialogue history, whilst multi-modal models can use additional learning objectives to obtain disentangled object representations, which become crucial to handle complex referential ambiguities across modalities overall.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15554v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.15554v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"what-are-you-referring-to-evaluating-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/jchiyah/what-are-you-referring-to","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"referring-expression","task_name":"Referring Expression"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"repair","method_name":"Repair"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2307.15554","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2307.15554","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}