Lost context must be announced, not silently reset

What it is

The user, still assuming common ground, says “cancel that.” On the system side the object has expired, and the reply is “what would you like to do?” — it sounds like turn one, as if “that” had never existed. Announce context loss requires: when a piece of common ground is gone, say which piece is gone, rather than silently resetting to a blank session. What is announced is the loss itself, not a recitation of a timeout rule. People can take “I no longer have that order.” They cannot take a system that pretends the two of you never mentioned it.

Why it happens

Common ground is the set each party believes the other still holds. A silent reset clears only the system side; the user’s pointer remains, so the same utterance splits: the user is doing anaphora, the system is doing cold-start intent classification. Faced with “cancel that,” the classifier lands on a slotless cancel intent, or guesses a popular cancellable item and acts — both worse than admitting the loss. Announcing is a grounding move: it writes “I no longer hold object X” where both can hear it, so the user can switch to a full name (“cancel today’s UA128”) or drop the attempt. The other face of not announcing is pretending the object is still there: a vague “okay” to a line that has nowhere to bind, followed by a no-op or a wrong act. Loss is not the same as never established. Never established can ask “cancel what.” Asking that like turn one after it was established denies shared history.

Studying it

Compare two expiry treatments: silent reset (next utterance as a new session) versus announced loss (state that the prior object is no longer held, and ask for a full name). Introduce an object, force expiry, then a pronominal command. Dependents: rate of users switching to a full name and completing, wrong execution from repeating the pronoun, and whether people afterwards say “it forgot” versus “it didn’t hear.” Independents: how much was lost (one slot versus the whole order) and how specific the announcement is (“I’m not sure what you mean” versus “I no longer have that flight”).

In playback, tag turns where the user is clearly anaphoric and the system takes a new-intent path — a field marker for silent reset. Do not let satisfaction wash it out: people will score “fast response” highly on a turn that already executed the wrong cancel.

Where it stops holding

If the object was never successfully introduced (recognition failed on turn one), there is no loss to announce; that is a this-turn miss, not “I forgot that order.” Announcing can reveal that a context once existed — in shared space, on sensitive content, saying aloud “I dropped your prescription” may be worse than silence; then the announce drops to “I didn’t catch the earlier object, please use the full name,” without speaking the content. After several turns already in the lost state, repeated announces become noise; after the first, collect a full name rather than apologise each line. Hearing announce as another “what would you like to do?” is still a silent reset, wrapped in politeness.

Applying it

• When expiry or a wipe has happened, and the next user utterance still looks anaphoric, admit the loss and then ask for a full name: “I no longer have that order. tell me which flight to cancel.” Do not use an opening-line “how can I help.”
• The announce names the kind of thing lost (which order, which meeting). Do not say only “I didn’t catch that” — that reports an acoustic problem for a state problem.
• On the first turn after loss, do not guess-execute from a popular slot; without a new full name, stop at the question.
• How to check: introduce an object → force expiry → user says “cancel it.” If the system executes some cancel, or replies with a line that could open a first turn, it silently reset. What should appear is a loss statement plus a request for a full name.

Related

• Same group: M1.04.1 Anaphora has to bind to a prior discourse object · M1.04.2 Context needs an explicit time-to-live
• Nearby: M1.06 Repair Strategies · M1.12 Opening and Closing a Dialogue · M2.04 Error-Recovery Wording
• Search terms: announce context loss · silent context reset · grounding of dropped referents