Social Grounding in Computer Supported Collaborative Problem Solving

This project has been submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation on February 27 1994. A postscript version of research outline is HERE (1MB non-structured PS file).

Summary

When we solve a problem with a colleague or a friend, we often use a piece of paper to draw a diagram or sketch. Such diagrams help us to build a shared representation of the problem and to repair communication breakdowns. Can we design equivalent artefacts to enrich human-computer collaboration? To answer this question, we propose to study the role of social grounding in human-human collaborative problem solving and to integrate functionally equivalent mechanisms into an interactive inference engine for human-computer collaboration. Our research will contribute to the theory of collaborative problem solving and lay the psychological foundations for new generations of interactive computer systems. We will proceed in three stages.
  1. Develop or adapt a computer-supported collaborative system.

    The system will be designed for creating the experimental settings necessary for stage 2 and stage 3. The reasons for mediating human-human collaboration are (1) to use the communication channel as an independent variable controlled by the computer system, (2) to coerce (to some extent) human partners to use interaction techniques that can be used in human-computer collaboration.

  2. Study the role of social grounding in human-human collaborative problem solving.

    Efficient collaboration requires that each partner understands what the other meant to a criterion sufficient for the current task. Social grounding is the process by which two partners try to reach the mutual belief that the other has reached this understanding criterion (Clark & Brennan, 1991). This goal can be achieved by various linguistic mechanisms, depending on the media used for communication. This project focuses on two issues: (1) how people use external references (drawing a diagram, pointing to an object) during social grounding and (2) the role of grounding mechanisms in problem solving. Three experimental settings are proposed in our research plan.

  3. Develop a human-computer collaborative system

    The goal is to develop human-computer interaction techniques that are functionally equivalent to the gestures observed in human-human social grounding. The difficulty is not to support gestures such as drawing or pointing. The challenge is to integrate these gestures within the reasoning process performed by a knowledge-based system. These gestures can be used for changing the problem state representation, guiding the rule selection, determining how to instantiate a variable, ...

This project, like our research team, is multidisciplinary. It is articulated with the research programme "Learning in Human and Machines" funded by the European Science Foundation (see section 2.2.1.5). This international and multidisciplinary program includes five task forces. The main contractor of this project, P. Dillenbourg, is responsible for the task force "collaborative learning". The first co-contractor, Prof. Mendelsohn, is also member of the program steering committee. The research plan explains how the experiments that we propose will serve as a basis for this international program.

Keywords: Collaborative problem solving, human-computer interaction, distributed cognition, social grounding, artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, groupware. For more information, call or write for Pierre Dillenbourg