Abstract
Users often assume that large language models (LLMs) share their cognitive alignment of context and intent, leading them to omit critical information in question-answering (QA) and produce ambiguous queries. Responses based on misaligned assumptions may be perceived as hallucinations. Therefore, identifying possible implicit assumptions is crucial in QA. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose Conditional Ambiguous Question-Answering (CondAmbigQA), a benchmark comprising 2,000 ambiguous queries and condition-aware evaluation metrics. Our study pioneers “conditions” as explicit contextual constraints that resolve ambiguities in QA tasks through retrieval-based annotation, where retrieved Wikipedia fragments help identify possible interpretations for a given query and annotate answers accordingly. Experiments demonstrate that models considering conditions before answering improve answer accuracy by 11.75%, with an additional 7.15% gain when conditions are explicitly provided. These results highlight that apparent hallucinations may stem from inherent query ambiguity rather than purely model failure, and demonstrate the effectiveness of condition reasoning in QA, providing researchers with tools for rigorous evaluation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | EMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference |
| Editors | Christos CHRISTODOULOPOULOS, Tanmoy CHAKRABORTY, Carolyn ROSE, Violet PENG |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
| Pages | 2269-2288 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9798891763326 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2025 |
| Event | 30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 - Suzhou, China Duration: 4 Nov 2025 → 9 Nov 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | EMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference |
|---|
Conference
| Conference | 30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | China |
| City | Suzhou |
| Period | 4/11/25 → 9/11/25 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics.
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