Yunho Maeng

DongGeon Lee, Ahjeong Park, Hyeri Lee et al.

Addressing non-factoid question answering (NFQA) remains challenging due to its open-ended nature, diverse user intents, and need for multi-aspect reasoning. These characteristics often reveal the limitations of conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches. To overcome these challenges, we propose Typed-RAG, a framework for type-aware decomposition of non-factoid questions (NFQs) within the RAG paradigm. Specifically, Typed-RAG first classifies an NFQ into a predefined type (e.g., Debate, Experience, Comparison). It then decomposes the question into focused sub-queries, each focusing on a single aspect. This decomposition enhances both retrieval relevance and answer quality. By combining the results of these sub-queries, Typed-RAG produces more informative and contextually aligned responses. Additionally, we construct Wiki-NFQA, a benchmark dataset for NFQA covering a wide range of NFQ types. Experiments show that Typed-RAG consistently outperforms existing QA approaches based on LLMs or RAG methods, validating the effectiveness of type-aware decomposition for improving both retrieval quality and answer generation in NFQA. Our code and dataset are available on https://github.com/TeamNLP/Typed-RAG.

Ye-eun Cho, Yunho Maeng

This study investigates whether vision-language models (VLMs) can perform pragmatic inference, focusing on ignorance implicatures, utterances that imply the speaker's lack of precise knowledge. To test this, we systematically manipulated contextual cues: the visually depicted situation (visual cue) and QUD-based linguistic prompts (linguistic cue). When only visual cues were provided, three state-of-the-art VLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 sonnet) produced interpretations largely based on the lexical meaning of the modified numerals. When linguistic cues were added to enhance contextual informativeness, Claude exhibited more human-like inference by integrating both types of contextual cues. In contrast, GPT and Gemini favored precise, literal interpretations. Although the influence of contextual cues increased, they treated each contextual cue independently and aligned them with semantic features rather than engaging in context-driven reasoning. These findings suggest that although the models differ in how they handle contextual cues, Claude's ability to combine multiple cues may signal emerging pragmatic competence in multimodal models.