Interactive Question Clarification in Dialogue via Reinforcement Learning (2020.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | ambiguous questions are a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement model to clarify ambiguous questions by suggesting refinements of the original query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on real-world user clicks and shows significant improvements . it suggests that the original query is refined to clarify ambiguous questions . |
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| Challenge: | In many domains, dialogue systems need to work collaboratively with users to reconstruct meaning . this requires a system that can give targeted, effective feedback about the system’s understanding . |
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ASK: Aspects and Retrieval based Hybrid Clarification in Task Oriented Dialogue Systems (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguous user queries pose a challenge in task-oriented dialogue systems . Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the top-k retrieved documents for clarification . traditional approaches lack principled mechanisms to determine when to use broad domain knowledge vs specific retrieved document context for clarification. |
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Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose to ask a clarification question where the user’s response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user's intention. |
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Clarify When Necessary: Resolving Ambiguity Through Interaction with LMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguity is embedded throughout natural language, and even simple utterances can have multiple interpretations when read in isolation. |
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Asking the Right Question at the Right Time: Human and Model Uncertainty Guidance to Ask Clarification Questions (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using model uncertainty as supervision for deciding when to ask may not be the most effective way to resolve model uncertainty. |
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Open-domain clarification question generation without question examples (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, natural language inputs are unclear or ambiguous, causing uncertainty in dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for building a visually grounded question-asking model capable of producing polar (yes-no) clarification questions to resolve misunderstandings in dialogue. |
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ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in conversational information seeking (CIS) suggest a remedy for the lack of interactive clarification when people face unfamiliar domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully autonomous conversational information-seeking agent that couples large language models with a set of domain-specific tools to provide product demand clarification. |
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Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In open-domain question answering, users often ask ambiguous questions (AQs) . one approach is to identify all possible interpretations of the AQ and generate a long-form answer addressing them all. |
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Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research addresses ambiguous visual questions by rephrasing questions, but it fails to address the inherently interactive nature of user interactions with visual language models (VLMs). Existing studies focus on re-phrase questions, and lack of a benchmark to assess VLMs’ capacity for resolving ambiguities through interaction. |
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Integrating Question Rewrites in Conversational Question Answering: A Reinforcement Learning Approach (2022.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve QR performance dependencies among dialogue history dependencies are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks without corresponding labeled QR datasets. |
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