QPaug: Question and Passage Augmentation for Open-Domain Question Answering of LLMs

Minsang Kim, Cheoneum Park, Seung Baek


Abstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has received much attention for Open-domain question-answering (ODQA) tasks as a means to compensate for the parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). While previous approaches focused on processing retrieved passages to remove irrelevant context, they still rely heavily on the quality of retrieved passages which can degrade if the question is ambiguous or complex. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient method called question and passage augmentation (QPaug) via LLMs for open-domain QA. QPaug first decomposes the original questions into multiple-step sub-questions. By augmenting the original question with detailed sub-questions and planning, we are able to make the query more specific on what needs to be retrieved, improving the retrieval performance. In addition, to compensate for the case where the retrieved passages contain distracting information or divided opinions, we augment the retrieved passages with self-generated passages by LLMs to guide the answer extraction. Experimental results show that QPaug outperforms the previous state-of-the-art and achieves significant performance gain over existing RAG methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.527
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9024–9042
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.527
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minsang Kim, Cheoneum Park, and Seung Baek. 2024. QPaug: Question and Passage Augmentation for Open-Domain Question Answering of LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9024–9042, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QPaug: Question and Passage Augmentation for Open-Domain Question Answering of LLMs (Kim et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.527.pdf