This paper presents DynRank, a novel framework for enhancing passage retrieval in open-domain question-answering systems through dynamic zero-shot question classification. Traditional approaches rely on static prompts and pre-defined templates, which may limit model adaptability across different questions and contexts. In contrast, DynRank introduces a dynamic prompting mechanism, leveraging a pre-trained question classification model that categorizes questions into fine-grained types. Based on these classifications, contextually relevant prompts are generated, enabling more effective passage retrieval. We integrate DynRank into existing retrieval frameworks and conduct extensive experiments on multiple QA benchmark datasets.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models have drawn considerable attention in modern open-domain question answering. The effectiveness of RAG depends on the quality of the top retrieved documents. However, conventional retrieval methods sometimes fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top. In this paper, we introduce ASRANK, a new re-ranking method based on scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent which relies on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of the document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent. Our approach demonstrates marked improvements across several datasets, including NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions. Notably, ASRANK increases Top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ from 19.2% to 46.5% for MSS and 22.1% to 47.3% for BM25. It also shows strong retrieval performance on several datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods (47.3 Top-1 by ASRANK vs 35.4 by UPR by BM25).

Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate a surprising amount of factual world knowledge. However, their performance on temporal questions and historical knowledge is limited because they often cannot understand temporal scope and orientation or neglect the temporal aspect altogether.In this study, we aim to measure precisely how robust LLMs are for question answering based on their ability to process temporal information and perform tasks requiring temporal reasoning and temporal factual knowledge. Specifically, we design eight time-sensitiverobustness tests for factual information to check the sensitivity of six popular LLMs in the zero-shot setting.Overall, we find LLMs lacking temporal robustness, especially to temporal reformulations and the use of different granularities of temporal references. We show how a selection of these eight tests can be used automatically to judge a model’s temporal robustness for user questions on the fly. Finally, we apply the findings of this study to improve the temporal QA performance by up to 55%.

Automatic Question Answering (QA) systems rely on contextual information to provide accurate answers. Commonly, contexts are prepared through either retrieval-based or generation-based methods. The former involves retrieving relevant documents from a corpus like Wikipedia, whereas the latter uses generative models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the context. In this paper, we introduce a novel context preparation approach called HINTQA, which employs Automatic Hint Generation (HG) techniques. Unlike traditional methods, HINTQA prompts LLMs to produce hints about potential answers for the question rather than generating relevant context. We evaluate our approach across three QA datasets including TriviaQA, Natural Questions, and Web Questions, examining how the number and order of hints impact performance. Our findings show that the HINTQA surpasses both retrieval-based and generation-based approaches. We demonstrate that hints enhance the accuracy of answers more than retrieved and generated contexts.

Detecting and answering ambiguous questions has been a challenging task in open-domain question answering. Ambiguous questions have different answers depending on their interpretation and can take diverse forms. Temporally ambiguous questions are one of the most common types of such questions. In this paper, we introduce TEMPAMBIQA, a manually annotated temporally ambiguous QA dataset consisting of 8,162 open-domain questions derived from existing datasets. Our annotations focus on capturing temporal ambiguity to study the task of detecting temporally ambiguous questions. We propose a novel approach by using diverse search strategies based on disambiguate versions of the questions. We also introduce and test non-search, competitive baselines for detecting temporal ambiguity using zero-shot and few-shot approaches.