Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

Gangwoo Kim, Sungdong Kim, Byeongguk Jeon, Joonsuk Park, Jaewoo Kang


Abstract
Questions in open-domain question answering are often ambiguous, allowing multiple interpretations. One approach to handling them is to identify all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question (AQ) and to generate a long-form answer addressing them all, as suggested by Stelmakh et al., (2022). While it provides a comprehensive response without bothering the user for clarification, considering multiple dimensions of ambiguity and gathering corresponding knowledge remains a challenge. To cope with the challenge, we propose a novel framework, Tree of Clarifications (ToC): It recursively constructs a tree of disambiguations for the AQ—via few-shot prompting leveraging external knowledge—and uses it to generate a long-form answer. ToC outperforms existing baselines on ASQA in a few-shot setup across the metrics, while surpassing fully-supervised baselines trained on the whole training set in terms of Disambig-F1 and Disambig-ROUGE. Code is available at https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.63
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
996–1009
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.63
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.63
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gangwoo Kim, Sungdong Kim, Byeongguk Jeon, Joonsuk Park, and Jaewoo Kang. 2023. Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 996–1009, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (Kim et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.63.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.63.mp4