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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00425 |
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| _version_ | 1866910978062417920 |
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| author | Chen, Bingsen Wang, Shengjie Ye, Xi Zhao, Chen |
| author_facet | Chen, Bingsen Wang, Shengjie Ye, Xi Zhao, Chen |
| contents | Multi-answer question answering (QA), where questions can have many valid answers, presents a significant challenge for existing retrieval-augmented generation-based QA systems, as these systems struggle to retrieve and then synthesize a large number of evidence passages. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new multi-answer QA framework -- Retrieval-augmented Independent Reading with Inter-passage Verification (RI$^2$VER). Our framework retrieves a large set of passages and processes each passage individually to generate an initial high-recall but noisy answer set. Then we propose a new inter-passage verification pipeline that validates every candidate answer through (1) Verification Question Generation, (2) Gathering Additional Evidence, and (3) Verification with inter-passage synthesis. Evaluations on the QAMPARI and RoMQA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing baselines across various model sizes, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 11.17%. Further analysis validates that our inter-passage verification pipeline enables our framework to be particularly beneficial for questions requiring multi-evidence synthesis. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00425 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Inter-Passage Verification for Multi-evidence Multi-answer QA Chen, Bingsen Wang, Shengjie Ye, Xi Zhao, Chen Computation and Language Multi-answer question answering (QA), where questions can have many valid answers, presents a significant challenge for existing retrieval-augmented generation-based QA systems, as these systems struggle to retrieve and then synthesize a large number of evidence passages. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new multi-answer QA framework -- Retrieval-augmented Independent Reading with Inter-passage Verification (RI$^2$VER). Our framework retrieves a large set of passages and processes each passage individually to generate an initial high-recall but noisy answer set. Then we propose a new inter-passage verification pipeline that validates every candidate answer through (1) Verification Question Generation, (2) Gathering Additional Evidence, and (3) Verification with inter-passage synthesis. Evaluations on the QAMPARI and RoMQA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing baselines across various model sizes, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 11.17%. Further analysis validates that our inter-passage verification pipeline enables our framework to be particularly beneficial for questions requiring multi-evidence synthesis. |
| title | Inter-Passage Verification for Multi-evidence Multi-answer QA |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00425 |