We present very early results on using GPT-3 to perform question answering on tabular data. We find that stock pre-trained GPT-3 is able to zero-shot learn the table structure from a serialized JSON array-of-arrays representation, and able to answer lookup queries and simple comparison questions in natural language without any fine-tuning. We further find that simple prompt engineering to include few-shot static Q&A examples significantly improves accuracy. Lastly, we find that intermixing passage text improves accuracy even further on heterogeneous data. We apply our approach on a novel dataset of simple tables in newspaper infographics with promising results. Overall, we find much cause for optimism in this basic approach.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.17284,
title = {Towards Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Table Question Answering using GPT-3},
author = {Pragya Srivastava and Tanuja Ganu and Saikat Guha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.17284},
year = {2022}
}