@inproceedings{sahay-etal-2025-ask,
    title = "{ASK}: Aspects and Retrieval based Hybrid Clarification in Task Oriented Dialogue Systems",
    author = "Sahay, Rishav  and
      Tekumalla, Lavanya Sita  and
      Aggarwal, Purav  and
      Jain, Arihant  and
      Saladi, Anoop",
    editor = "Rehm, Georg  and
      Li, Yunyao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-industry.63/",
    pages = "881--895",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-288-6",
    abstract = "Ambiguous user queries pose a significant challenge in task-oriented dialogue systems relying on information retrieval. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating clarification questions to tackle query ambiguity, they rely solely on the top-k retrieved documents for clarification which fails when ambiguity is too high to retrieve relevant documents in the first place. Traditional approaches lack principled mechanisms to determine when to use broad domain knowledge vs specific retrieved document context for clarification. We propose AsK, a novel hybrid approach that dynamically chooses between document-based or aspect-based clarification based on query ambiguity. Our approach requires no labeled clarification data and introduces: (1) Weakly-supervised Longformer-based ambiguity analysis, (2) Automated domain-specific aspect generation using clustering and LLMs and (3) LLM-powered clarification generation. AsK demonstrates significant improvements over baselines in both single-turn and multi-turn settings (recall@5 gain of {\textasciitilde}20{\%}) when evaluated on product troubleshooting and product search datasets."
}