# Query Refinement Prompts for Closed-Book Long-Form Question Answering

Source: [Query Refinement Prompts for Closed-Book Long-Form Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6dc41e209131cea3bf62>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:18:29.441Z

Authors: Reinald Kim Amplayo, Kellie Webster, Michael Collins, Dipanjan Das, Shashi Narayan

Published: 2022-10-31T17:44:42.000Z

## Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well in answering questions and in producing long-form texts, both in few-shot closed-book settings. While the former can be validated using well-known evaluation metrics, the latter is difficult to evaluate. We resolve the difficulties to evaluate long-form output by doing both tasks at once -- to do question answering that requires long-form answers. Such questions tend to be multifaceted, i.e., they may have ambiguities and/or require information from multiple sources. To this end, we define query refinement prompts that encourage LLMs to explicitly express the multifacetedness in questions and generate long-form answers covering multiple facets of the question. Our experiments on two long-form question answering datasets, ASQA and AQuAMuSe, show that using our prompts allows us to outperform fully finetuned models in the closed book setting, as well as achieve results comparable to retrieve-then-generate open-book models.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.17525>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.17525.pdf>)
