Query Disambiguation via Answer-Free Context: Doubling Performance on Humanity's Last Exam
How carefully and unambiguously a question is phrased has a profound impact on the quality of the response, for Language Models (LMs) as well as people. While model capabilities continue to advance, the interplay between grounding context and query formulation remains under-explored. This work investigates how the quality of background grounding information in a model's context window affects accuracy. We find that combining well-grounded dynamic context construction (i.e, RAG) with query rewriting reduces question ambiguity, resulting in significant accuracy gains. Given a user question with associated answer-free grounding context, rewriting the question to reduce ambiguity produces benchmark improvements without changing the answer itself, even compared to prepending that context before the question. Using \texttt{gpt-oss-20b} to rewrite a subset of Humanity's Last Exam using answer-free grounding context improves \texttt{gpt-5-mini} accuracy from 0.14 to 0.37. We demonstrate that this accuracy improvement cannot be fully recovered just through prompting at inference time; rather, distinct rewriting and answering phases are required. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mmajurski/lm-rewrite-uplift
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Integrating Symbolic Natural Language Understanding and Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation
Word sense disambiguation is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding. Current methods are primarily aimed at coarse-grained representations (e.g. WordNet synsets or FrameNet frames) and require hand-ann…
Natural Language UnderstandingWord Sense DisambiguationMultilingual Reasoning Cascades Need More Context
Translation cascades for reasoning translate the query from another language to English, reason in English, and translate the answer back to the original language. This is a competitive approach to multilingual reasoning…
Machine TranslationAggregation Queries over Unstructured Text: Benchmark and Agentic Method
Aggregation query over free text is a long-standing yet underexplored problem. Unlike ordinary question answering, aggregate queries require exhaustive evidence collection and systems are required to "find all," not mere…
Question AnsweringA Graph Traversal Based Approach to Answer Non-Aggregation Questions Over DBpedia
We present a question answering system over DBpedia, filling the gap between user information needs expressed in natural language and a structured query interface expressed in SPARQL over the underlying knowledge base (K…
Question AnsweringTopic Level Disambiguation for Weak Queries
Despite limited success, information retrieval (IR) systems today are not intelligent or reliable. IR systems return poor search results when users formulate their information needs into incomplete or ambiguous queries (…
Information RetrievalLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingRetrieval+1