Recursive Question Understanding for Complex Question Answering over Heterogeneous Personal Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Christmann, Philipp, Weikum, Gerhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
author_facet Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
contents Question answering over mixed sources, like text and tables, has been advanced by verbalizing all contents and encoding it with a language model. A prominent case of such heterogeneous data is personal information: user devices log vast amounts of data every day, such as calendar entries, workout statistics, shopping records, streaming history, and more. Information needs range from simple look-ups to queries of analytical nature. The challenge is to provide humans with convenient access with small footprint, so that all personal data stays on the user devices. We present ReQAP, a novel method that creates an executable operator tree for a given question, via recursive decomposition. Operators are designed to enable seamless integration of structured and unstructured sources, and the execution of the operator tree yields a traceable answer. We further release the PerQA benchmark, with persona-based data and questions, covering a diverse spectrum of realistic user needs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11900
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recursive Question Understanding for Complex Question Answering over Heterogeneous Personal Data
Christmann, Philipp
Weikum, Gerhard
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Question answering over mixed sources, like text and tables, has been advanced by verbalizing all contents and encoding it with a language model. A prominent case of such heterogeneous data is personal information: user devices log vast amounts of data every day, such as calendar entries, workout statistics, shopping records, streaming history, and more. Information needs range from simple look-ups to queries of analytical nature. The challenge is to provide humans with convenient access with small footprint, so that all personal data stays on the user devices. We present ReQAP, a novel method that creates an executable operator tree for a given question, via recursive decomposition. Operators are designed to enable seamless integration of structured and unstructured sources, and the execution of the operator tree yields a traceable answer. We further release the PerQA benchmark, with persona-based data and questions, covering a diverse spectrum of realistic user needs.
title Recursive Question Understanding for Complex Question Answering over Heterogeneous Personal Data
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11900