Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts

Abstract

Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks largely overlook this requirement, focusing instead on explicitly encoded context or perceptual recognition, and thus underex- plore context-dependent pragmatic understand- ing, particularly in high-context languages such as Korean. We introduce READI, a multimodal benchmark for evaluating ISA understanding through integrated reasoning over visual con- text and dialogue. READI models graded in- directness grounded in pragmatic theory and formulates the task as vision-based pragmatic question answering (V-PQA), supporting cross- lingual evaluation in English and Korean. Ex- periments show that even state-of-the-art multi- modal models struggle with visually grounded indirect speech acts, with performance declin- ing as indirectness increases, underscoring the need for benchmarks that explicitly target con- textual pragmatic reasoning.