ScopeQA: A Framework for Generating Out-of-Scope Questions for RAG

Conversational AI agents use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide verifiable document-grounded responses to user inquiries. However, many natural questions do not have good answers: about 25\% contain false assumptions~\cite{Yu2023:CREPE}, and over 50\% are ambiguous~\cite{DBLP:conf/emnlp/MinMHZ20}. RAG agents need high-quality data to improve their responses to confusing questions. This paper presents a novel guided hallucination-based method to efficiently generate a diverse set of borderline out-of-scope confusing questions for a given document corpus. We conduct an empirical comparative evaluation of several large language models as RAG agents to measure the accuracy of confusion detection and appropriate response generation. We contribute a benchmark dataset to the public domain.