Bridging Information Gaps with Comprehensive Answers: Improving the Diversity and Informativeness of Follow-Up Questions

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Zhe, Kang, Taekyu, Wang, Haoyu, Alavi, Seyed Hossein, Shwartz, Vered
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Liu, Zhe
Kang, Taekyu
Wang, Haoyu
Alavi, Seyed Hossein
Shwartz, Vered
author_facet Liu, Zhe
Kang, Taekyu
Wang, Haoyu
Alavi, Seyed Hossein
Shwartz, Vered
contents Generating diverse follow-up questions that uncover missing information remains challenging for conversational agents, particularly when they run on small, locally hosted models. To address this, we develop an information-gap-driven knowledge distillation pipeline in which a teacher LLM generates a comprehensive answer, contrasts it with the initial answer to identify information gaps, and formulates gap-bridging follow-up questions. Using this pipeline, we augment the existing FollowupQG dataset tenfold. We then fine-tune smaller student models on the augmented dataset to distill the teacher's knowledge. Experiments with selected teacher-student model pairs show that fine-tuned students achieve significantly higher informativeness and diversity than variations trained on the original dataset. These findings indicate that our pipeline, which mirrors the human cognitive process of information seeking, provides an efficient distillation channel from state-of-the-art LLMs to smaller models, enabling resource-constrained conversational systems to generate more diverse and informative follow-up questions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17715
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Information Gaps with Comprehensive Answers: Improving the Diversity and Informativeness of Follow-Up Questions
Liu, Zhe
Kang, Taekyu
Wang, Haoyu
Alavi, Seyed Hossein
Shwartz, Vered
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Generating diverse follow-up questions that uncover missing information remains challenging for conversational agents, particularly when they run on small, locally hosted models. To address this, we develop an information-gap-driven knowledge distillation pipeline in which a teacher LLM generates a comprehensive answer, contrasts it with the initial answer to identify information gaps, and formulates gap-bridging follow-up questions. Using this pipeline, we augment the existing FollowupQG dataset tenfold. We then fine-tune smaller student models on the augmented dataset to distill the teacher's knowledge. Experiments with selected teacher-student model pairs show that fine-tuned students achieve significantly higher informativeness and diversity than variations trained on the original dataset. These findings indicate that our pipeline, which mirrors the human cognitive process of information seeking, provides an efficient distillation channel from state-of-the-art LLMs to smaller models, enabling resource-constrained conversational systems to generate more diverse and informative follow-up questions.
title Bridging Information Gaps with Comprehensive Answers: Improving the Diversity and Informativeness of Follow-Up Questions
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17715