Open-domain question answering is a crucial task that often requires
accessing external information. Existing methods typically adopt a single-turn
retrieve-then-read approach, where relevant documents are first retrieved, and
questions are then answered based on the retrieved information. However, there
are cases where answering a question requires implicit knowledge that is not
directly retrievable from the question itself. In this work, we propose a novel
question-answering pipeline called eamSearchQA. Our approach leverages large
language models(LLMs) to iteratively generate new questions about the original
question, enabling an iterative reasoning process. By iteratively refining and
expanding the scope of the question, our method aims to capture and utilize
hidden knowledge that may not be directly obtainable through retrieval. We
evaluate our approach on the widely-used open-domain NQ and WebQ datasets. The
experimental results demonstrate that BeamSearchQA significantly outperforms
other zero-shot baselines, indicating its effectiveness in tackling the
challenges of open-domain question answering.

本研究提出了一个名为 BeamSearchQA 的新型问题回答管道，它通过使用大型语言模型迭代地生成关于原始问题的新问题，从而启用一个迭代推理过程，以便更好地捕捉和利用隐藏知识。实验结果表明，BeamSearchQA 明显优于其他零 - shot 基线，在处理开放性领域问题回答方面具有很强的有效性。