“Grounding in communication” discusses in detail all the elements necessary for communication to achieve common ground. Clarke and Brennan posit that grounding is basic to communication, especially when a conversation needs to move forward. In grounding, two factors have an important effect on a conversation, it’s purpose and the medium. To establish what participants in a conversation have understood, it is important to set grounding criterion. These help us establish what information was presented and what information was registered, understood and accepted.
Understanding when a piece of information has been initiated, and when it has been acknowledged is important when trying to measure the grounding in a piece of communication. The authors also state that grounding changes with purpose and also different contexts while also noting the costs of grounding and grounding techniques. The authors also illustrate different concepts in grounding using examples.
In the context of the CSCW class, grounding in communication is essential in establishing a logical flow in conversation. In synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration, it is essential that information is presented clearly and understood and accepted by participants. Moreover, the design of modern collaborative systems has to account for factors that affect grounding in communication. The many numbers of media that exist beyond simple text communications, such as the use of emoticons, multiple devices and modalities have increased the complexity of communication, and therefore designers and engineers need to account for these different contexts and use cases when designing user interfaces.
“It takes two people working together to play a duet, shake hands, play chess, waltz, teach or make love. To succeed, the two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of what they are doing.”
Clarke & Brennan, Grounding in Communication,1991
I believe that grounding is especially important when humans communicate with automated and autonomous systems. Chatbots, and smartphone and voice UI have become an integral part of our digital experience. Understanding the tradeoffs, constraints, and factors that affect grounding in communication will help design better interfaces. The importance of Clarke and Brennan’s contribution to the theories of communication cannot be overstated. This study has influenced many researchers to build models to help improve communication between humans and AI [1,2], moreover, ideas in grounding theory have helped improve the design for many fields of study from collaborative to work [3] to interface design [5,6] and non-verbal communication with technology [4].
In summary, grounding is essential to communication. When a conversation topic is mutually intelligible and agreed upon in the context of the situation, then we have grounding. Special techniques have evolved for different situations, within this framework exist different costs for different techniques and faults. The lesson is that communication is a collective, collaborative activity. Grounding helps in keeping a conversation coordinated for all participants. This is especially true for modern-day communication.
References:
- Serban, I. V., Sordoni, A., Bengio, Y., Courville, A., & Pineau, J. (2016, March). Building end-to-end dialogue systems using generative hierarchical neural network models. In Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- Hasson, U., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1693), 20150366.
- Jeong, H., & Hmelo-Silver, C. E. (2016). Seven affordances of computer-supported collaborative learning: How to support collaborative learning? How can technologies help?. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 247-265.
- Knapp, M. L., Hall, J. A., & Horgan, T. G. (2013). Nonverbal communication in human interaction. Cengage Learning.
- Rosson, M. B., Carroll, J. M., & Hill, N. (2002). Usability engineering: scenario-based development of human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann.
- Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000, December). Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 79-88). ACM.