Question Types for Knowledge Acquisition in LLM-based Dialogue Systems: Experiments with Simulated and Human Users

Kazunori Komatani, Ryu Takeda, Mikio Nakano


Abstract
To acquire knowledge from users through dialogue, systems must decide not only what to ask but also how to ask it. Since users may not always be willing to answer such questions, question formulation affects both user experience and the information obtained. Prior work has examined question types in controlled, template-based settings, but it remains unclear whether similar effects are observed in LLM-based dialogues. We investigated the effects of question type on knowledge acquisition through experiments with both an LLM-based user simulator and crowdsourced human participants. We compared three question types: implicit questions, explicit questions, and wh-questions. The results showed no substantial differences in user annoyance among the question types. In contrast, the question types differed in how well they elicited correct responses: wh-questions were less effective, whereas implicit and explicit questions performed comparably. The findings suggest that candidate-guided question forms are useful when the system has a plausible candidate answer, whereas wh-questions may be appropriate when the system lacks sufficient confidence to ask a more specific question.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigdial-1.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2026
Address:
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Editors:
Jinho D. Choi, Yun-Nung Chen, Kotaro Funakoshi, Ali Emami
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
602–613
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.43/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kazunori Komatani, Ryu Takeda, and Mikio Nakano. 2026. Question Types for Knowledge Acquisition in LLM-based Dialogue Systems: Experiments with Simulated and Human Users. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 602–613, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Question Types for Knowledge Acquisition in LLM-based Dialogue Systems: Experiments with Simulated and Human Users (Komatani et al., SIGDIAL 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.43.pdf