Community question-answering platforms are important ecosystems for knowledge sharing, yet research on what makes an answer best or a question engaging has often focused on either individual lexical features or broad topics. This exploratory study examines both levels in Yahoo! Chiebukuro, asking which nouns and semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection and question engagement. We analyze a large corpus of questions and answer-tier posts collected under the keyword logistics, using an offline machine-translation pipeline with manually validated noun-level fidelity. Best-answer selection is modeled with conditional logistic regression within question threads, controlling for answer length, order, and question-answer noun overlap. Engagement is modeled in two stages: whether a question receives any response and, conditional on receiving one, how many responses it attracts. Operational logistics nouns such as distribution, warehouse, and center are associated with best-answer selection, whereas broader civic and infrastructure nouns such as car, tax, and shinkansen are associated with higher engagement. At the cluster level, most semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection, while the clusters associated with response likelihood and response volume are largely distinct. These findings reveal differentiated content-outcome profiles across answer and question levels and provide a domain-wide descriptive map of engagement and answer selection in logistics-related cQA discourse.
Question answering studies how AI systems interpret questions and produce accurate, evidence-grounded answers across text, dialogue, and multimodal data.
We introduce DiscoTrace, a method to identify the rhetorical strategies answerers use when responding to information-seeking questions. DiscoTrace represents answers as a sequence of question-related discourse acts paired with interpretations of the original question, annotated on top of rhetorical structure theory parses. Applying DiscoTrace to answers from nine different communities reveals that communities have diverse preferences for answer construction. In contrast, LLMs do not exhibit rhetorical diversity in their answers, even when prompted to mimic specific human community answering guidelines. LLMs also systematically opt for breadth, addressing interpretations of questions that human answerers choose not to address. The rich, community-sensitive answering behavior structurally revealed by DiscoTrace can guide the development of pragmatic LLM answerers that are more attuned to contextual information needs.
Neha Srikanth, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Rachel Rudinger
Pluralistic alignment requires systems to adapt to diverse user values, communication styles, and contextual assumptions. We believe that a foundational prerequisite for such alignment enabling accurate preference elicitation from people when their intent is under-specified or ambiguous. We study the problem of preference elicitation in multi-turn question answering by decomposing the problem into two components: a clarification policy, which decides whether to ask a clarifying question or answer directly, and post-clarification answering, which produces the correct final answer once the missing information is provided. We show, using the PACIFIC benchmark, that supervised fine-tuning rapidly improves the clarification policy, however, final answer accuracy remains substantially lower even when the model takes the correct action. This gap indicates that understanding and correctly interpreting the user's response is the critical gap in multi-turn question-answering systems.
Retrieval-augmented QA can fail even when the correct answer is in the retrieved evidence. This can happen when a competing answer satisfies some, but not all, of the question's requirements and is mentioned frequently in the retrieved documents, which can make it appear to be the best-supported answer. To test whether this retrieval skew actually affects the decision, we manipulate it directly: increasing the prevalence of passages that favor the competing answer makes the model more likely to select it. This points to a decision problem that candidate-level support alone cannot resolve. We therefore introduce Joint Constraint Aggregation (JCA), which compares candidates against the same question-derived requirements using the retrieved evidence. Across three evaluation settings and three instruction-tuned backbones, JCA improves overall accuracy, and its advantage grows when retrieval favors a competing answer. Together, these results suggest that when partial matches and retrieval prominence pull models toward a competing answer, comparing candidates against the question's full requirements can make selection more reliable.
Jennifer Hsia, Zachary C. Lipton, Aarti Singh
Machine Learning Department Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA