How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present a large-scale dataset for the task of rewriting an ill-formed natural language question to a well-formed one. Our multi-domain question rewriting MQR dataset is constructed from human contributed Stack Exchange question edit histories. The dataset contains 427,719 question pairs which come from 303 domains. We provide human annotations for a subset of the dataset as a quality estimate. When moving from ill-formed to well-formed questions, the question quality improves by an average of 45 points across three aspects. We train sequence-to-sequence neural models on the constructed dataset and obtain an improvement of 13.2% in BLEU-4 over baseline methods built from other data resources. We release the MQR dataset to encourage research on the problem of question rewriting.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2019.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 2; 2023: 3; 2024: 3; 2025: 3.
12 papers.
- 2024ChatQA: Surpassing GPT-4 on Conversational QA and RAGcited by 90
- 2023Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinementcited by 43
- 2021Will this Question be Answered? Question Filtering via Answer Model Distillation for Efficient Question Answeringcited by 19
- 2025Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancycited by 7
- 2022Decoding a Neural Retriever's Latent Space for Query Suggestioncited by 5
- 2024Generative Query Reformulation Using Ensemble Prompting, Document Fusion, and Relevance Feedbackcited by 5
- 2024Putting People in LLMs' Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewritercited by 3
- 2023Answering Unanswered Questions through Semantic Reformulations in Spoken QAcited by 2
- 2023Lost In Translation: Generating Adversarial Examples Robust to Round-Trip Translationcited by 2
- 2025Multi-stage Prompt Refinement for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2022Towards leveraging latent knowledge and Dialogue context for real-world conversational question answeringcited by 0
- 2025CPR: Mitigating Large Language Model Hallucinations with Curative Prompt Refinementcited by 0
- 2025Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy17 Nov 2025
- 2025Multi-stage Prompt Refinement for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models14 Oct 2025
- 2025CPR: Mitigating Large Language Model Hallucinations with Curative Prompt Refinement14 Oct 2025
- 2024Putting People in LLMs' Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewriter20 Aug 2024
- 2024Generative Query Reformulation Using Ensemble Prompting, Document Fusion, and Relevance Feedback27 May 2024
- 2024ChatQA: Surpassing GPT-4 on Conversational QA and RAG18 Jan 2024
- 2023Lost In Translation: Generating Adversarial Examples Robust to Round-Trip Translation24 Jul 2023
- 2023Answering Unanswered Questions through Semantic Reformulations in Spoken QA27 May 2023
- 2023Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement23 May 2023
- 2022Towards leveraging latent knowledge and Dialogue context for real-world conversational question answering17 Dec 2022
- 2022Decoding a Neural Retriever's Latent Space for Query Suggestion21 Oct 2022
- 2021Will this Question be Answered? Question Filtering via Answer Model Distillation for Efficient Question Answering14 Sep 2021