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User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinyan Su , Claire Cardie

Users often formulate their search queries with immature language without well-developed keywords and complete structures. Such queries fail to express their true information needs and raise ambiguity as fragmental language often yield…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Zhenduo Wang , Qingyao Ai

Resolving ambiguities through interaction is a hallmark of natural language, and modeling this behavior is a core challenge in crafting AI assistants. In this work, we study such behavior in LMs by proposing a task-agnostic framework for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Michael J. Q. Zhang , Eunsol Choi

Users often ask dialogue systems ambiguous questions that require clarification. We show that current language models rarely ask users to clarify ambiguous questions and instead provide incorrect answers. To address this, we introduce CLAM:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Lorenz Kuhn , Yarin Gal , Sebastian Farquhar

Clarification questions are an essential dialogue tool to signal misunderstanding, ambiguities, and under-specification in language use. While humans are able to resolve uncertainty by asking questions since childhood, modern dialogue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Alberto Testoni , Raquel Fernández

Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Irina Saparina , Mirella Lapata

In visual question answering (VQA) context, users often pose ambiguous questions to visual language models (VLMs) due to varying expression habits. Existing research addresses such ambiguities primarily by rephrasing questions. These…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Pu Jian , Donglei Yu , Wen Yang , Shuo Ren , Jiajun Zhang

In interactions between users and language model agents, user utterances frequently exhibit ellipsis (omission of words or phrases) or imprecision (lack of exactness) to prioritize efficiency. This can lead to varying interpretations of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Hyuhng Joon Kim , Youna Kim , Cheonbok Park , Junyeob Kim , Choonghyun Park , Kang Min Yoo , Sang-goo Lee , Taeuk Kim

Task oriented Dialogue Systems generally employ intent detection systems in order to map user queries to a set of pre-defined intents. However, user queries appearing in natural language can be easily ambiguous and hence such a direct…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Kaustubh D. Dhole

Ambiguous words or underspecified references require interlocutors to resolve them, often by relying on shared context and commonsense knowledge. Therefore, we systematically investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can leverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Lukas Ellinger , Georg Groh

Large language models (LLMs) must often respond to highly ambiguous user requests. In such cases, the LLM's best response may be to ask a clarifying question to elicit more information. Existing LLMs often respond by presupposing a single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Michael J. Q. Zhang , W. Bradley Knox , Eunsol Choi

Ambiguity remains a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to the inherent complexity and flexibility of human language. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing ambiguity has become even more…

Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Jeremy R. Cole , Michael J. Q. Zhang , Daniel Gillick , Julian Martin Eisenschlos , Bhuwan Dhingra , Jacob Eisenstein

Coping with ambiguous questions has been a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems. Although clarification by asking questions is a common form of human interaction, it is hard to define appropriate questions to elicit more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-18 Xiang Hu , Zujie Wen , Yafang Wang , Xiaolong Li , Gerard de Melo

Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Felix Gervits , Gordon Briggs , Antonio Roque , Genki A. Kadomatsu , Dean Thurston , Matthias Scheutz , Matthew Marge

Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previously, Min et al. (2020) have tackled this issue by generating disambiguated questions for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Dongryeol Lee , Segwang Kim , Minwoo Lee , Hwanhee Lee , Joonsuk Park , Sang-Woo Lee , Kyomin Jung

Clarification resolution plays an important role in various information retrieval tasks such as interactive question answering and conversational search. In such context, the user often formulates their information needs as short and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hadrien Lautraite , Nada Naji , Louis Marceau , Marc Queudot , Eric Charton

Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Hamed Zamani , Bhaskar Mitra , Everest Chen , Gord Lueck , Fernando Diaz , Paul N. Bennett , Nick Craswell , Susan T. Dumais

Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Stefan F. Schouten , Peter Bloem , Ilia Markov , Piek Vossen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made it possible for recommendation systems to interact with users in open-ended conversational interfaces. In order to personalize LLM responses, it is crucial to elicit user preferences, especially when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ali Montazeralghaem , Guy Tennenholtz , Craig Boutilier , Ofer Meshi
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