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This study explores how listeners in dialogue manage their understanding when faced with referential uncertainty, contrasting traditional mismatch-driven updating with a more nuanced uncertainty-sensitive policy. The researchers developed a controlled framework to evaluate four revision strategies, revealing that while mismatch-driven policies destabilize understanding, an uncertainty-sensitive approach allows for coherent retention of prior beliefs amidst new information. The key finding is that local mismatches actually encourage preservation of existing beliefs, while only significant accumulated uncertainty prompts revision, aligning with conceptual pact theory.
Local mismatches in dialogue can paradoxically lead to stronger preservation of prior beliefs rather than immediate revisions, challenging conventional assumptions about listener behavior.
When a speaker refers to a scene that the listener cannot directly see, the listener must decide whether to preserve its current understanding or revise it as new utterances arrive. Many language systems treat local mismatch as a cue for updating: divergence from the current understanding encourages adjustment. Yet conversational understanding may be more conservative, interpreting mismatching evidence relative to prior understanding rather than immediately revising it. We introduce a controlled, data-driven framework for turn-by-turn preserve/revise decisions in dialogue, where competing revision policies are learned under otherwise identical conditions. We compare four theory-driven revision strategies, each reflecting a different assumption about when listeners should preserve or revise. Two findings stand out. First, a mismatch-driven policy that updates solely based on local divergence reacts strongly to mismatch but destabilizes grounding and degrades retrieval. Second, an uncertainty-sensitive policy extends mismatch-based updating with accumulated evidence, preserving coherent understanding while maintaining strong retrieval performance. Surprisingly, coherent understanding emerges from a counterintuitive pattern: local mismatch promotes preservation, whereas accumulated uncertainty promotes revision, suggesting that listeners maintain prior understanding despite local mismatch and revise only when uncertainty sufficiently accumulates. This pattern is consistent with conceptual pact theory.
