Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it