# A Simple but Effective Elaborative Query Reformulation Approach for Natural Language Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02656 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02656/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

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

- [ChessQA: Evaluating Large Language Models for Chess Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23948/) (2025)
- [Semantic XPath: Structured Agentic Memory Access for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01160/) (2026)
- [Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes Guided by LLM Relevance Scoring for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17906/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Scene-based In-Situ Item Labeling for Immersive Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09698/) (2026)
- [SafeGEO: Understanding Generative Engine Optimization Risks in Recommendation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28356/) (2026)
- [Temporal Order Matters for Agentic Memory: Segment Trees for Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04555/) (2026)
- [MicroVerse: An Instrument for Measuring Self-Authored Identity Drift in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Language-Model Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15844/) (2026)
- [ReBOL: Retrieval via Bayesian Optimization with Batched LLM Relevance Observations and Query Reformulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20513/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural Language (NL) recommender systems aim to retrieve relevant items from free-form user queries and item descriptions. Existing systems often rely on dense retrieval (DR), which struggles to interpret challenging queries that express broad (e.g., "cities for youth friendly activities") or indirect (e.g., "cities for a high school graduation trip") user intents. While query reformulation (QR) has been widely adopted to improve such systems, existing QR methods tend to focus only on expanding the range of query subtopics (breadth) or elaborating on the potential meaning of a query (depth), but not both. In this paper, we propose EQR (Elaborative Subtopic Query Reformulation), a large language model-based QR method that combines both breadth and depth by generating potential query subtopics with information-rich elaborations. We also introduce three new natural language recommendation benchmarks in travel, hotel, and restaurant domains to establish evaluation of NL recommendation with challenging queries. Experiments show EQR substantially outperforms state-of-the-art QR methods in various evaluation metrics, highlighting that a simple yet effective QR approach can significantly improve NL recommender systems for queries with broad and indirect user intents.