# Unsupervised Question Clarity Prediction Through Retrieved Item Coherency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Benchmarking Prompt Sensitivity in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06065/) (2025)
- [Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10750/) (2023)
- [Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10923/) (2023)
- [Transforming Human-Centered AI Collaboration: Redefining Embodied Agents Capabilities through Interactive Grounded Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10783/) (2023)
- [Collecting Interactive Multi-modal Datasets for Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06552/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00179/) (2025)
- [IDAT: A Multi-Modal Dataset and Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Interactive Task-Solving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08898/) (2024)
- [Can QPP Choose the Right Query Variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22661/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent progress on conversational systems, they still do not perform smoothly and coherently when faced with ambiguous requests. When questions are unclear, conversational systems should have the ability to ask clarifying questions, rather than assuming a particular interpretation or simply responding that they do not understand. Previous studies have shown that users are more satisfied when asked a clarifying question, rather than receiving an unrelated response. While the research community has paid substantial attention to the problem of predicting query ambiguity in traditional search contexts, researchers have paid relatively little attention to predicting when this ambiguity is sufficient to warrant clarification in the context of conversational systems. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for predicting the need for clarification. This method is based on the measured coherency of results from an initial answer retrieval step, under the assumption that a less ambiguous query is more likely to retrieve more coherent results when compared to an ambiguous query. We build a graph from retrieved items based on their context similarity, treating measures of graph connectivity as indicators of ambiguity. We evaluate our approach on two recently released open-domain conversational question answering datasets, ClariQ and AmbigNQ, comparing it with neural and non-neural baselines. Our unsupervised approach performs as well as supervised approaches while providing better generalization.