Dense Paraphrasing for multimodal dialogue interpretation

Multimodal dialogue involving multiple participants presents complex computational challenges, primarily due to the rich interplay of diverse communicative modalities including speech, gesture, action, and gaze. These modalities interact in complex ways that traditional dialogue systems often struggle to accurately track and interpret. To address these challenges, we extend the textual enrichment strategy of Dense Paraphrasing (DP), by translating each nonverbal modality into linguistic expressions. By normalizing multimodal information into a language-based form, we hope to both simplify the representation for and enhance the computational understanding of situated dialogues. We show the effectiveness of the dense paraphrased language form by evaluating instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) against the Common Ground Tracking (CGT) problem using a publicly available collaborative problem-solving dialogue dataset. Instead of using multimodal LLMs, the dense paraphrasing technique represents the dialogue information from multiple modalities in a compact and structured machine-readable text format that can be directly processed by the language-only models. We leverage the capability of LLMs to transform machine-readable paraphrases into human-readable paraphrases, and show that this process can further improve the result on the CGT task. Overall, the results show that augmenting the context with dense paraphrasing effectively facilitates the LLMs' alignment of information from multiple modalities, and in turn largely improves the performance of common ground reasoning over the baselines. Our proposed pipeline with original utterances as input context already achieves comparable results to the baseline that utilized decontextualized utterances which contain rich coreference information. When also using the decontextualized input, our pipeline largely improves the performance of common ground reasoning over the baselines. We discuss the potential of DP to create a robust model that can effectively interpret and integrate the subtleties of multimodal communication, thereby improving dialogue system performance in real-world settings.