# Typed-RAG: Type-Aware Decomposition of Non-Factoid Questions for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15879 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15879/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14403/) (2024)
- [ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08957/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Large Language Model Performance To Answer Questions and Extract Information More Accurately](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01722/) (2024)
- [LINKAGE: Listwise Ranking among Varied-Quality References for Non-Factoid QA Evaluation via LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14744/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Climate Finance Bench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22752/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Addressing non-factoid question answering (NFQA) remains challenging due to its open-ended nature, diverse user intents, and need for multi-aspect reasoning. These characteristics often reveal the limitations of conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches. To overcome these challenges, we propose Typed-RAG, a framework for type-aware decomposition of non-factoid questions (NFQs) within the RAG paradigm. Specifically, Typed-RAG first classifies an NFQ into a predefined type (e.g., Debate, Experience, Comparison). It then decomposes the question into focused sub-queries, each focusing on a single aspect. This decomposition enhances both retrieval relevance and answer quality. By combining the results of these sub-queries, Typed-RAG produces more informative and contextually aligned responses. Additionally, we construct Wiki-NFQA, a benchmark dataset for NFQA covering a wide range of NFQ types. Experiments show that Typed-RAG consistently outperforms existing QA approaches based on LLMs or RAG methods, validating the effectiveness of type-aware decomposition for improving both retrieval quality and answer generation in NFQA. Our code and dataset are available on https://github.com/TeamNLP/Typed-RAG.