2024/04/28 by Yizhou Chi, Chi, Yizhou, Jessy Lin +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.15784
openalex publication_date 2024/04/28 · openalex created_date 2024/05/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Users often make ambiguous requests that require clarification. We study the problem of asking clarification questions in an information retrieval setting, where systems often face ambiguous search queries and it is challenging to turn the uncertainty in the retrieval model into a natural language question. We present CLARINET, a system that asks informative clarification questions by choosing questions whose answers would maximize certainty in the correct candidate. Our approach works by augmenting a large language model (LLM) to condition on a retrieval distribution, finetuning end-to-end to generate the question that would have maximized the rank of the true candidate at each turn. When evaluated on a real-world retrieval dataset of users searching for books, our system outperforms traditional heuristics such as information gain on retrieval success by 17% and vanilla-prompted LLMs by 39% relative.