{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tree-of-clarifications-answering-ambiguous","title":"Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2310.14696","date":"2023-10-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gangwoo Kim","Sungdong Kim","Byeongguk Jeon","Joonsuk Park","Jaewoo Kang"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14696v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.14696v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tree-of-clarifications-answering-ambiguous","repo_url":"https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"open-domain-question-answering","task_name":"Open-Domain Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2310.14696","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.14696","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.14696"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":2,"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":3,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":3,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f246ae3401dd6507","entry":"Node","repo":"gankim/tree-of-clarifications","repo_kind":"official","path":"toc/tree.py","file_url":"https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications/blob/HEAD/toc/tree.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f246ae3401dd6507"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"26ea88f00c154ef5","entry":"ToC","repo":"gankim/tree-of-clarifications","repo_kind":"official","path":"toc/tree.py","file_url":"https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications/blob/HEAD/toc/tree.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"26ea88f00c154ef5"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1bb2bf8367bb1dbf","entry":"make_str_disambig","repo":"gankim/tree-of-clarifications","repo_kind":"official","path":"toc/tree.py","file_url":"https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications/blob/HEAD/toc/tree.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1bb2bf8367bb1dbf"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}