In plain words: Vague questions get matched to a bank of clear, single-meaning questions written from Wikipedia passages, pulling in passages that cover different readings of the question. This raised the share of correct answers recalled by 15% over the best earlier system.
Abstract · Answering Ambiguous Questions with a Database of Questions, Answers, and Revisions
Many open-domain questions are under-specified and thus have multiple possible answers, each of which is correct under a different interpretation of the question. Answering such ambiguous questions is challenging, as it requires retrieving and then reasoning about diverse information from multiple passages. We present a new state-of-the-art for answering ambiguous questions that exploits a database of unambiguous questions generated from Wikipedia. On the challenging ASQA benchmark, which requires generating long-form answers that summarize the multiple answers to an ambiguous question, our method improves performance by 15% (relative improvement) on recall measures and 10% on measures which evaluate disambiguating questions from predicted outputs. Retrieving from the database of generated questions also gives large improvements in diverse passage retrieval (by matching user questions q to passages p indirectly, via questions q' generated from p).
Haitian Sun, William W. Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
arXiv:2308.08661 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Aug 16, 2023
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