ASK: Aspects and retrieval based hybrid clarification in task oriented dialogue systems

Ambiguous user queries pose a significant challenge in task-oriented dialogue systems relying on information retrieval. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating clarification questions to tackle query ambiguity, they rely solely on the topk retrieved documents for clarification which fails when ambiguity is too high to retrieve relevant documents in the first place. Traditional approaches lack principled mechanisms to determine when to use broad domain knowledge vs specific retrieved document context for clarification. We propose AsK, a novel hybrid approach that dynamically chooses between document-based or aspect-based clarification based on query ambiguity. Our approach requires no labeled ambiguity/clarification data and introduces: (1) Weakly-supervised Longformer-based ambiguity analysis, (2) Automated domain-specific aspect generation using clustering and LLMs and (3) LLM-powered clarification generation. AsK demonstrates significant improvements over baselines in both single-turn and multi-turn settings (recall@5 gain of ~20%) when evaluated on product troubleshooting and product search datasets.