Ambiguity is an inherent feature of language, whose management is crucial for effective communication and collaboration. This is particularly true for Chinese, a language with extensive lexical-morphemic ambiguity. Despite the wide use of large language models (LLMs) in numerous domains and their growing proficiency in Chinese, there is a notable lack of datasets to thoroughly evaluate LLMs’ ability to handle ambiguity in Chinese. To bridge this gap, we introduce the CHAmbi dataset, a specialized Chinese multi-label disambiguation dataset formatted in Natural Language Inference. It comprises 4,991 pairs of premises and hypotheses, including 824 examples featuring a wide range of ambiguities. In addition to the dataset, we develop a series of tests and conduct an extensive evaluation of pre-trained LLMs’ proficiency in identifying and resolving ambiguity in the Chinese language. Our findings reveal that GPT-4 consistently delivers commendable performance across various evaluative measures, albeit with limitations in robustness. The performances of other LLMs, however, demonstrate variability in handling ambiguity-related tasks, underscoring the complexity of such tasks in the context of Chinese. The overall results highlight the challenge of ambiguity handling for current LLMs and underscore the imperative need for further enhancement in LLM capabilities for effective ambiguity resolution in the Chinese language.

Open domain question answering (ODQA) is a longstanding task aimed at answering factual questions from a large knowledge corpus without any explicit evidence in natural language processing (NLP). Recent works have predominantly focused on improving the answering accuracy and have achieved promising progress. However, higher accuracy often requires more memory consumption and inference latency, which might not necessarily be efficient enough for direct deployment in the real world. Thus, a trade-off between accuracy, memory consumption and processing speed is pursued. In this paper, we will survey recent advancements in the efficiency of ODQA models and conclude core techniques for achieving efficiency. Additionally, we will provide a quantitative analysis of memory cost, query speed, accuracy, and overall performance comparison. Our goal is to keep scholars informed of the latest advancements and open challenges in ODQA efficiency research and contribute to the further development of ODQA efficiency.