[Submitted on 3 Nov 2026]
Title:When to Ask, When to Answer: Strategic Clarification for Ambiguous Reference Resolution in Dialogue
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Abstract:For humans, referential disambiguation is a collaborative process involving clarification questions asked when they will meaningfully change the outcome. However, large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be biased toward premature answering, preferring definite single-turn responses over more clarification exchanges. In this paper, we study the problem of "strategic clarification" -- asking clarification questions in a reference game when their answers will narrow the set of candidate referents. We construct a controlled test environment from the SIMMC 2.1 dataset that records how many questions each ambiguous reference needs to be successfully resolved, and examine how baseline LLM behavior and common post-training methods ask clarifying questions vs. attempt to answer the referent. We also propose BACE (Belief-Aware Critic with Epistemic tracking), a lightweight action chooser method on top of a frozen LM backbone, and show that BACE more consistently chooses the optimal number of clarifying questions than methods such as GRPO and ArCHer.
Comments: 22 pages, 10 figures. Code and data: this https URL
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2611.05517 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2611.05517v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05517
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Ibrahim Khebour [view email] [v1] Tue, 3 Nov 2026 19:14:42 UTC (1,503 KB)
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