Beyond Boundaries: A Human-like Approach for Question Answering over Structured and Unstructured Information Sources

Abstract Answering factual questions from heterogenous sources, such as graphs and text, is a key capacity of intelligent systems. Current approaches either (i) perform question answering over text and structured sources as separate pipelines followed by a merge step or (ii) provide an early integration, giving up the strengths of particular information sources. To solve this problem, we present “HumanIQ”, a method that teaches language models to dynamically combine retrieved information by imitating how humans use retrieval tools. Our approach couples a generic method for gathering human demonstrations of tool use with adaptive few-shot learning for tool augmented models. We show that HumanIQ confers significant benefits, including i) reducing the error rate of our strongest baseline (GPT-4) by over 50% across 3 benchmarks, (ii) improving human preference over responses from vanilla GPT-4 (45.3% wins, 46.7% ties, 8.0% loss), and (iii) outperforming numerous task-specific baselines.