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
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-05/2023.emnlp-main.63.pdf