← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.05517 · v1
When to Ask, When to Answer: Strategic Clarification for Ambiguous Reference Resolution in Dialogue
首次提交 2026-11-04 03:14
版本更新 2026-11-04 03:14
雷达观测 2026-11-05 10:08
摘要
For humans, referential disambiguation is a collaborative process involving clarification questions asked when they will meaningfully change the outcome. However, large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be biased toward premature answering, preferring definite single-turn responses over more clarification exchanges. In this paper, we study the problem of "strategic clarification" -- asking clarification questions in a reference game when their answers will narrow the set of candidate referents. We construct a controlled test environment from the SIMMC 2.1 dataset that records how many questions each ambiguous reference needs to be successfully resolved, and examine how baseline LLM behavior and common post-training methods ask clarifying questions vs. attempt to answer the referent. We also propose BACE (Belief-Aware Critic with Epistemic tracking), a lightweight action chooser method on top of a frozen LM backbone, and show that BACE more consistently chooses the optimal number of clarifying questions than methods such as GRPO and ArCHer.
作者备注：22 pages, 10 figures. Code and data: https://github.com/csu-signal/Clarifying_Ambiguous_References
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v1 · 2026-11-04 03:14 · 最新观测版本
When to Ask, When to Answer: Strategic Clarification for Ambiguous Reference Resolution in Dialogue
For humans, referential disambiguation is a collaborative process involving clarification questions asked when they will meaningfully change the outcome. However, large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be biased toward premature answering, preferring definite single-turn responses over more clarification exchanges. In this paper, we study the problem of "strategic clarification" -- asking clarification questions in a reference game when their answers will narrow the set of candidate referents. We construct a controlled test environment from the SIMMC 2.1 dataset that records how many questions each ambiguous reference needs to be successfully resolved, and examine how baseline LLM behavior and common post-training methods ask clarifying questions vs. attempt to answer the referent. We also propose BACE (Belief-Aware Critic with Epistemic tracking), a lightweight action chooser method on top of a frozen LM backbone, and show that BACE more consistently chooses the optimal number of clarifying questions than methods such as GRPO and ArCHer.
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