Research seminar: Hendrik Buschmeier, Bielefeld University
Title: Human and Machine Understanding in Reference Games and Game Explanations.
Photo: Hendrik Buschmeier
In this talk, I will present data and experiments from two research projects investigating human dialogical interaction: playing reference games and providing game explanations.
The first project is broadly investigating computational linguistic creativity in reference games. I will present analyses of humans playing a simple reference game alongside experiments with vision-language models (attempting) to resolve references in this domain with little success and a lack of interactional strategies to improve their understanding (Junker et al., 2025; Ali et al., 2026).
The second project broadly investigates how explainers monitor explainees' understanding of explanations. I will briefly introduce our MUNDEX corpus (Multimodal corpus for the study of the UNDerstanding of EXplanations; Türk et al., 2023) and present our findings on classifying the multimodal expressions of understanding and non-understanding displayed by the explainees (Türk et al., 2024). I will also discuss our plans for conceptualising these expressions as multimodal ensembles and gestalts.
The seminar is held in English.
References
Ali, M., Sieker, J., Zarrieß, S., & Buschmeier, H. (2026). Reference games as a testbed for the alignment of model uncertainty and clarification requests (arXiv:2601.07820). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.07820
Junker, S., Ali, M., Koch, L., Zarrieß, S., & Buschmeier, H. (2025). Are multimodal large language models pragmatically competent listeners in simple reference resolution tasks? Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, 24101–24109. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1236
Türk, O., Wagner, P., Buschmeier, H., Grimminger, A., Wang, Y., & Lazarov, S. (2023). MUNDEX: A multimodal corpus for the study of the understanding of explanations. Proceedings of the 1st International Multimodal Communication Symposium, 63–64.
Türk, O., Lazarov, S., Wang, Y., Buschmeier, H., Grimminger, A., & Wagner, P. (2024). Predictability of understanding in explanatory interactions based on multimodal cues. Proceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 449–458. https://doi.org/10.1145/3678957.3685741
Last updated: 2026-02-11
Source: Department of Linguistics