ModelRefs / Open-Domain Question Answering — AI Glossary

Open-Domain Question Answering — AI Glossary

Question answering without constraining the answer to a specific document; the model must retrieve or recall facts from broad knowledge.

Overview

Open-domain QA (Natural Questions, TriviaQA, WebQuestions) tests whether a model knows or can find an answer anywhere in its parameters or retrieval corpus. Retrieval-augmented approaches (DPR+FiD) dominated pre-LLM; frontier LLMs answer many factoid questions parametrically. Still benefits from RAG for freshness and verifiability.

Reference details

Topicprompting
Last reviewed2026-06-24

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Frequently asked questions

What is Open-Domain Question Answering?

Question answering without constraining the answer to a specific document; the model must retrieve or recall facts from broad knowledge.

What concepts are related to Open-Domain Question Answering?

Closely related concepts include retrieval pipeline, rag, multi document qa.