# How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [Generative Query Reformulation Using Ensemble Prompting, Document Fusion, and Relevance Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17658/) (2024)
- [Putting People in LLMs' Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewriter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10573/) (2024)
- [Answering Unanswered Questions through Semantic Reformulations in Spoken QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17393/) (2023)
- [Lost In Translation: Generating Adversarial Examples Robust to Round-Trip Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12520/) (2023)
- [Multi-stage Prompt Refinement for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12032/) (2025)
- [Towards leveraging latent knowledge and Dialogue context for real-world conversational question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08946/) (2022)
- [CPR: Mitigating Large Language Model Hallucinations with Curative Prompt Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12029/) (2025)

## 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.