Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX

In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information — maps with different landmarks, or a board game only one side knows — mutual understanding has to be built through the interaction, and gaze is one of the few observable traces of that process. We compare two such tasks: HCRC MapTask, where perspectivist labels mark a reference as aligned only when speaker and addressee interpretations match, and MUNDEX, German game explanations with retrospective understanding judgments from both sides. Both annotate gaze as discrete behavioral categories rather than eye-tracking coordinates, but with different category sets (up/down/off; partner/table/away), so we map them into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around each grounding-labeled unit.

The associations point the same way in both: aligned references and "understood" judgments come with more task-directed gaze, less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions — clearest for whoever leads the task (givers, explainers). In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, speaker gaze entropy drops at the mention where a referent becomes aligned. Effects are small and prediction gains over role/condition controls are modest, so we read gaze as one contributing cue to grounding rather than a standalone signal. Because the representation only needs discrete gaze labels, it should port to other corpora — happy to discuss, especially whether shared category names pick out the same interactional function across quite different tasks.