Challenge: Open-domain question answering is a task to answer questions using passages with diverse topics.
Approach: They propose a model that aggregates evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AmbigQA dataset and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA.

Similar Papers

Model Analysis & Evaluation for Ambiguous Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Ambiguous questions are a challenge for Question Answering models as they require answers that cover multiple interpretations of the original query.
Approach: They aim to investigate whether model/data scaling improves the answers’ quality and whether automated metrics align with human judgment.
Outcome: The proposed models can generate long-form answers that combine conflicting information and provide valuable insights into the limitations of the current approaches.
AmbigQA: Answering Ambiguous Open-domain Questions (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing open-domain question answering systems assume questions have a single welldefined answer.
Approach: They propose an open-domain question answering task which involves finding every plausible answer and rewriting the question for each one to resolve the ambiguity.
Outcome: The proposed task is based on a dataset covering 14,042 open-domain questions . it shows that strong models benefit from weakly supervised learning .
Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves F1 of 61.3, 25.1, and 40.5 on the three tasks, demonstrating the need for further improvements while providing competitive baselines for future work.
Answering Ambiguous Questions via Iterative Prompting (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Empirical studies show that AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency than competing approaches.
Approach: They propose an answering model with a prompting model to address imperfections in open-domain question answering . Empirical studies show AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on two commonly-used open benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency.
Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Approach: They propose a framework that generates a long-form answer addressing all possible interpretations of an ambiguous question.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on ASQA in a few-shot setup across metrics while surpassing fully-supervised baselines trained on the whole training set in terms of Disambig-F1 and Disambigo-ROUGE.
CondAmbigQA: A Benchmark and Dataset for Conditional Ambiguous Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) generate unreliable responses due to their cognitive alignment of context and intent.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to identify possible implicit assumptions in QA questions . they use retrieved Wikipedia fragments to identify interpretations for a given query .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark identifies possible implicit assumptions and improves answer accuracy by 11.75% . retrieved Wikipedia fragments help identify possible interpretations for a given query .
Adaptive Question Answering: Enhancing Language Model Proficiency for Addressing Knowledge Conflicts with Source Citations (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work on citation generation has focused on unambiguous settings with single answers, failing to address the complexity of real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a task of QA with source citation in ambiguous settings where multiple valid answers exist, where multiple sources exist.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates multiple answers and cites their sources, allowing users to verify the factuality of each answer and make informed decisions.
Agentic Verification for Ambiguous Query Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Prior Diversify-then-Verify pipelines generate interpretations and then retrieve evidence . ambiguous queries require RAG to disambiguate into interpretations that can be answered from corpus .
Approach: They propose a novel approach that unifies diversification with verification by integrating retriever relevance and generator answerability feedback early.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves grounding-aware F1 by 23% over baselines across multiple LLMs.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Visual question answering models seek to answer questions about images . ambiguity can exist at all levels of linguistic analysis, but disagreements can be difficult to detect and resolve .
Approach: They develop a question-generation model which integrates group information without supervision and uses a dataset of ambiguous examples to annotate answers.
Outcome: The proposed model can integrate answer group information without supervision and is able to fill knowledge gaps and convey requests.
Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Prior work has focused on the case in which the question is clear and the answer is unambiguous but possibly unknown.
Approach: They propose to use a sampled set of questions to calibrate answers to ambiguous questions with varying model scales.
Outcome: The results show that sampling-based confidence scores help calibrate answers to relatively unambiguous questions, with more dramatic improvements on ambiguous ones.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations