Challenge: Question decomposition has been found to improve large language models’ (LLMs) performance on complex question answering (QA) however, performance on the task remains dominated by supervised approaches, suggesting room for making LLMs better decomposers.
Approach: They propose to generate synthetic decomposition data with only five annotated examples by extending recent advances in using LLM-as-judge and for reranking in novel ways.
Outcome: The proposed approach generates synthetic decomposition data with only five examples over two benchmark datasets.

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Is a Question Decomposition Unit All We Need? (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many NLP benchmarks.
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On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a data-centric solution to alleviate limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation.
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Learning to Decompose: Hypothetical Question Decomposition Based on Comparable Texts (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to end-to-end questionanswering assume that pre-trained language can decompose complex tasks into more straightforward sub-tasks.
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Better as Generators Than Classifiers: Leveraging LLMs and Synthetic Data for Low-Resource Multilingual Classification (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multilingual capabilities, making them promising tools in both high- and low-resource languages.
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Unsupervised Question Decomposition for Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing QA systems struggle to answer complex questions because information is scattered in different places.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised algorithm that decomposes hard questions into simpler sub-questions . they propose an algorithm that can be used to generate a final answer from millions of questions .
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When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading? (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on decompositions of complex questions has focused on multi-step reasoning . but, in machine reading, it is unclear when decomposing is helpful .
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Chain-of-Question: A Progressive Question Decomposition Approach for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to answer complex questions rely on decomposition of complex questions into sub-questions . Existing approaches to decompose complex questions are limited by the original question .
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Small Language Models Fine-tuned to Coordinate Larger Language Models improve Complex Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent attempts at prompt decomposition toward solving complex, multi-step reasoning problems depend on the ability of the LLM to simultaneously decompose and solve the problem.
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Exploiting Asymmetry for Synthetic Training Data Generation: SynthIE and the Case of Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have great potential for synthetic data generation.
Approach: They show that large language models can generate useful data even for complex tasks . they use a symmetric task difficulty asymmetry to prompt an LLM to generate plausible input text for a target output structure.
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Question Decomposition for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is effective for question answering tasks . multi-hop questions, such as "Which company among NVIDIA, Apple, and Google made the biggest profit in 2023?" challenge RAG because relevant facts are often distributed across multiple documents .
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