Rethinking "Questions" for Context-aware Question-answering

Rethinking "Questions" for
Context-aware Question-answering
2026. 08. 04 @Agent Memory Study
Won Ik Cho

Why does context matter?
• The problem
 Long-context QA needs evidence spread across a large corpus
 Sometimes this context is not necessarily in document format
 ‘Stuff everything in the prompt' affects accuracy and cost
 The agent must choose what to retrieve, keep, and discard
• This relates to the pragmatics of “Question”
 How is question defined?
 How interaction regarding question yields the information structure?
 What is ‘question under discussion’?
 How can we relate QUDs with multi-hop question-answering?
 How should the clues for question-answering be managed while interaction?
1

Assume information structure is universal
3

Goals, rules, moves, strategies, and CG/Context set
5

Question as a set of propositions
6

Question, Information structure,
Question under discussion

Question
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e.g., Who was the president of United States in the year in which World War II began?
Mavi et al. (2022)
p1: World War II began in 1939.
p2: Franklin D. Roosevelt was the president of United States in 1939.

Questions in information structure
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30

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Multi-hop QA and Multi-turn dialogue

MHQA as QUD in information structure
• Finding answer for q which can be iteratively answered by
decomposing q to multiple (wh-)subquestions
 Solving MHQA: QUD reaching the end (getting answer / unanswerable)
 Set of contexts: Common ground
 Set of related contexts: Strategy of inquiry (step by step manner)
 : Goal of the discourse (among interlocutors)
 ௜: Assertion for each subquestion
 Hop: Adding an accepted assertion
 Reasoning chain: An ordered set of assertion for each subquestion
 Ordered permutation: <
38

QA in multi-turn dialogue as MHQA
• Common ground
 Dialogue history (and that they talked) becomes context
• Strategy of inquiry
 “Relevant” contents of dialogue history
• Goal of the discourse
 Continuing the conversation based on the premise that all participants
comprehends the utterances of each other
• < (order)
 Logical + Temporal factors both apply
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Takeaways
• Multi-turn QA intuitively becomes multi-hop QA so while
managing knowledge for solving questions in multi-turn manner, it
is important to
 formalize questions for atomic accumulation (hopefully multiple wh-
manner)
 accummulate common ground as context
 assign timestamps to moves for ordering
 remove (or omit) unaccepted moves
 remove (or edit) negated moves
 manage QUD based on relevance
 distinguish resolved (answered, unanswerable) from QUDs (while
maintainig that those are answered/unanswerable)
 use appropriate strategy depending on the type of MHQA the multi-turn
QA belongs to
40

Thank you!
Questions & Discussion welcome.

Rethinking "Questions" for Context-aware Question-answering

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