Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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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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Know What I don’t Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unknown Questions for Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a plausible SQL query for arbitrary user questions, thereby failing to handle problematic user questions. |
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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. |
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Mehrab Tanjim, Yeonjun In, Xiang Chen, Victor Bursztyn, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Guang-Jie Ren, Vaishnavi Muppala, Shun Jiang, Yongsung Kim, Chanyoung Park
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Answering Ambiguous Questions through Generative Evidence Fusion and Round-Trip Prediction (2021.acl-long)
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Yifan Gao, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Zhiguo Wang, Feng Nan, Dejiao Zhang, Ramesh Nallapati, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task to answer questions using passages with diverse topics. |
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Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
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The Problem of Ambiguity in Table Question Answering (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to question answering on tabular data have limited capabilities due to ambiguousness inherent to tabular datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to answer questions on tabular data by analyzing tabular tables and detecting ambiguity. |
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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. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates a long-form answer addressing all possible interpretations of an ambiguous question. |
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AmbigQA: Answering Ambiguous Open-domain Questions (2020.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
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