# Structured List-Grounded Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03950/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01693/) (2023)
- [MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10774/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03439/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19736/) (2023)
- [AnnoLLM: Making Large Language Models to Be Better Crowdsourced Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16854/) (2023)
- [Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06599/) (2023)
- [doc2dial: A Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06623/) (2020)
- [Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01494/) (2018)
- [MultiDoc2Dial: Modeling Dialogues Grounded in Multiple Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12595/) (2021)
- [DoQA -- Accessing Domain-Specific FAQs via Conversational QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01328/) (2020)
- [Tiny Titans: Can Smaller Large Language Models Punch Above Their Weight in the Real World for Meeting Summarization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00841/) (2024)
- [ConditionalQA: A Complex Reading Comprehension Dataset with Conditional Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06884/) (2021)
- [DIALKI: Knowledge Identification in Conversational Systems through Dialogue-Document Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04673/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Step Reasoning by Solving Arithmetic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01707/) (2023)
- [GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05512/) (2024)
- [UniGDD: A Unified Generative Framework for Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07770/) (2022)
- [Improved Instruction Ordering in Recipe-Grounded Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17280/) (2023)
- [Small Language Models for Application Interactions: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20347/) (2024)
- [Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10927/) (2023)
- [KTRL+F: Knowledge-Augmented In-Document Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08329/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document-grounded dialogue systems aim to answer user queries by leveraging external information. Previous studies have mainly focused on handling free-form documents, often overlooking structured data such as lists, which can represent a range of nuanced semantic relations. Motivated by the observation that even advanced language models like GPT-3.5 often miss semantic cues from lists, this paper aims to enhance question answering (QA) systems for better interpretation and use of structured lists. To this end, we introduce the LIST2QA dataset, a novel benchmark to evaluate the ability of QA systems to respond effectively using list information. This dataset is created from unlabeled customer service documents using language models and model-based filtering processes to enhance data quality, and can be used to fine-tune and evaluate QA models. Apart from directly generating responses through fine-tuned models, we further explore the explicit use of Intermediate Steps for Lists (ISL), aligning list items with user backgrounds to better reflect how humans interpret list items before generating responses. Our experimental results demonstrate that models trained on LIST2QA with our ISL approach outperform baselines across various metrics. Specifically, our fine-tuned Flan-T5-XL model shows increases of 3.1% in ROUGE-L, 4.6% in correctness, 4.5% in faithfulness, and 20.6% in completeness compared to models without applying filtering and the proposed ISL method.