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Learning to Ask Good Questions: Ranking Clarification Questions using Neural Expected Value of Perfect Information

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the task of ranking clarification questions. Our model is inspired by the idea of expected value of perfect information: a good question is one whose expected answer will be useful. We study this problem using data from StackExchange, a plentiful online resource in which people routinely ask clarifying questions to posts so that they can better offer assistance to the original poster. We create a dataset of clarification questions consisting of ~77K posts paired with a clarification question (and answer) from three domains of StackExchange: askubuntu, unix and superuser. We evaluate our model on 500 samples of this dataset against expert human judgments and demonstrate significant improvements over controlled baselines.

fields

cs.AI 2 cs.CL 2

representative citing papers

Uncertainty-Aware Clarification in LLM Agents with Information Gain

cs.AI · 2026-06-02 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

The paper introduces an Information Gain Reward to train clarification behavior in LLM agents, reporting a 3.7% success rate gain over no-clarification baselines in τ-Bench evaluations across five models with minimal added steps.

Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft?

cs.AI · 2019-07-22 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

A rationale is presented for developing an assistant in Minecraft to advance natural language understanding and dialogue learning.

citing papers explorer

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

  • An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference cs.CL · 2021-11-03 · conditional · none · ref 295 · internal anchor

    In-context learning emerges as implicit Bayesian inference of latent concepts when pretraining data has long-range coherence, proven for mixture-of-HMM distributions and replicated on the synthetic GINC dataset.

  • Learning to Ask: When LLM Agents Meet Unclear Instruction cs.CL · 2024-08-31 · unverdicted · none · ref 18 · internal anchor

    Introduces NoisyToolBench benchmark and Ask-when-Needed framework to improve LLM tool-use performance when user instructions are unclear or incomplete.

  • Uncertainty-Aware Clarification in LLM Agents with Information Gain cs.AI · 2026-06-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 6 · internal anchor

    The paper introduces an Information Gain Reward to train clarification behavior in LLM agents, reporting a 3.7% success rate gain over no-clarification baselines in τ-Bench evaluations across five models with minimal added steps.

  • Why Build an Assistant in Minecraft? cs.AI · 2019-07-22 · unverdicted · none · ref 69 · internal anchor

    A rationale is presented for developing an assistant in Minecraft to advance natural language understanding and dialogue learning.