Synthetic Clarification and Correction Dialogues about Data-Centric Tasks -- A Teacher-Student Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Poelitz, Christian, McKenna, Nick
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Poelitz, Christian
McKenna, Nick
author_facet Poelitz, Christian
McKenna, Nick
contents Real dialogues with AI assistants for solving data-centric tasks often follow dynamic, unpredictable paths due to imperfect information provided by the user or in the data, which must be caught and handled. Developing datasets which capture such user-AI interactions is difficult and time-consuming. In this work, we develop a novel framework for synthetically generating controlled, multi-turn conversations between a user and AI assistant for the task of table-based question answering, which can be generated from an existing dataset with fully specified table QA examples for any target domain. Each conversation aims to solve a table-based reasoning question through collaborative effort, modeling one of two real-world scenarios: (1) an AI-initiated clarification, or (2) a user-initiated correction. Critically, we employ a strong teacher LLM to verify the correctness of our synthetic conversations, ensuring high quality. We demonstrate synthetic datasets generated from TAT-QA and WikiTableQuestions as benchmarks of frontier LLMs. We find that even larger models struggle to effectively issuing clarification questions and accurately integrate user feedback for corrections.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14167
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthetic Clarification and Correction Dialogues about Data-Centric Tasks -- A Teacher-Student Approach
Poelitz, Christian
McKenna, Nick
Computation and Language
Real dialogues with AI assistants for solving data-centric tasks often follow dynamic, unpredictable paths due to imperfect information provided by the user or in the data, which must be caught and handled. Developing datasets which capture such user-AI interactions is difficult and time-consuming. In this work, we develop a novel framework for synthetically generating controlled, multi-turn conversations between a user and AI assistant for the task of table-based question answering, which can be generated from an existing dataset with fully specified table QA examples for any target domain. Each conversation aims to solve a table-based reasoning question through collaborative effort, modeling one of two real-world scenarios: (1) an AI-initiated clarification, or (2) a user-initiated correction. Critically, we employ a strong teacher LLM to verify the correctness of our synthetic conversations, ensuring high quality. We demonstrate synthetic datasets generated from TAT-QA and WikiTableQuestions as benchmarks of frontier LLMs. We find that even larger models struggle to effectively issuing clarification questions and accurately integrate user feedback for corrections.
title Synthetic Clarification and Correction Dialogues about Data-Centric Tasks -- A Teacher-Student Approach
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14167