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Specialized transformer-based models for encoding tabular data have gained interest in academia. Although tabular data is omnipresent in industry, applications of table transformers are still missing. In this paper, we study how these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Aneta Koleva , Martin Ringsquandl , Mark Buckley , Rakebul Hasan , Volker Tresp

Question Answering (QA) is a task in natural language processing that has seen considerable growth after the advent of transformers. There has been a surge in QA datasets that have been proposed to challenge natural language processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Kate Pearce , Tiffany Zhan , Aneesh Komanduri , Justin Zhan

Pretrained deep-learning models are the go-to solution for images or text. However, for tabular data the standard is still to train tree-based models. Indeed, transfer learning on tables hits the challenge of data integration: finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Myung Jun Kim , Léo Grinsztajn , Gaël Varoquaux

Table question answering (TQA) focuses on answering questions based on tabular data. Developing TQA systems targets effective interaction with tabular data for tasks such as cell retrieval and data analysis. While recent work has leveraged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Wei Zhou , Mohsen Mesgar , Heike Adel , Annemarie Friedrich

Tabular data (or tables) are the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). However, ML models often assume the table structure keeps fixed in training and testing. Before ML modeling, heavy data cleaning is required to merge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zifeng Wang , Jimeng Sun

Transformer networks have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, leveraging a variety of architectural innovations, including residual connections. However, traditional residual connections, which simply sum the outputs of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Mike Heddes , Adel Javanmard , Kyriakos Axiotis , Gang Fu , MohammadHossein Bateni , Vahab Mirrokni

Table Question-Answering involves both understanding the natural language query and grounding it in the context of the input table to extract the relevant information. In this context, many methods have highlighted the benefits of…

Databases · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Raphaël Mouravieff , Benjamin Piwowarski , Sylvain Lamprier

Most existing end-to-end Table Question Answering (Table QA) models consist of a two-stage framework with a retriever to select relevant table candidates from a corpus and a reader to locate the correct answers from table candidates. Even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Feifei Pan , Mustafa Canim , Michael Glass , Alfio Gliozzo , James Hendler

Semi-structured table question answering (QA) is a challenging task that requires (1) precise extraction of cell contents and positions and (2) accurate recovery of key implicit logical structures, hierarchical relationships, and semantic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jinxiu Qu , Zirui Tang , Hongzhang Huang , Boyu Niu , Wei Zhou , Jiannan Wang , Yitong Song , Guoliang Li , Xuanhe Zhou , Fan Wu

Dealing with tabular data is challenging due to partial information, noise, and heterogeneous structure. Existing techniques often struggle to simultaneously address key aspects of tabular data such as textual information, a variable number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Wei Min Loh , Jiaqi Shang , Pascal Poupart

Data preparation, also called data wrangling, is considered one of the most expensive and time-consuming steps when performing analytics or building machine learning models. Preparing data typically involves collecting and merging data from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Michael Glass , Xueqing Wu , Ankita Rajaram Naik , Gaetano Rossiello , Alfio Gliozzo

It is challenging to automatically evaluate the answer of a QA model at inference time. Although many models provide confidence scores, and simple heuristics can go a long way towards indicating answer correctness, such measures are heavily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Lukas Muttenthaler , Isabelle Augenstein , Johannes Bjerva

Tabular question answering (TQA) presents a challenging setting for neural systems by requiring joint reasoning of natural language with large amounts of semi-structured data. Unlike humans who use programmatic tools like filters to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Carlos Gemmell , Jeffrey Dalton

Table foundation models bring high hopes to data science: pre-trained on tabular data to embark knowledge or priors, they should facilitate downstream tasks on tables. One specific challenge is that of data semantics: numerical entries take…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Myung Jun Kim , Félix Lefebvre , Gaëtan Brison , Alexandre Perez-Lebel , Gaël Varoquaux

We propose a novel method for applying Transformer models to extractive question answering (QA) tasks. Recently, pretrained generative sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have achieved great success in question answering. Contributing to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Peng Xu , Davis Liang , Zhiheng Huang , Bing Xiang

Table Question Answering (Table QA) refers to providing precise answers from tables to answer a user's question. In recent years, there have been a lot of works on table QA, but there is a lack of comprehensive surveys on this research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Nengzheng Jin , Joanna Siebert , Dongfang Li , Qingcai Chen

Open-domain table question answering traditionally relies on a two-stage pipeline: static table retrieval followed by a closed-domain answer. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end agentic framework that embeds multi-turn tool calls-using a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zipeng Qiu

Question answering on tabular data (a.k.a TableQA), which aims at generating answers to questions grounded on a provided table, has gained significant attention recently. Prior work primarily produces concise factual responses through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Wenting Zhao , Ye Liu , Yao Wan , Yibo Wang , Zhongfen Deng , Philip S. Yu

The web contains a vast corpus of HTML tables. They can be used to provide direct answers to many web queries. We focus on answering two classes of queries with those tables: those seeking lists of entities (e.g., `cities in california')…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Kaushik Chakrabarti , Zhimin Chen , Siamak Shakeri , Guihong Cao , Surajit Chaudhuri

Although Transformers-based architectures excel at processing textual information, their naive adaptation for tabular data often involves flattening the table structure. This simplification can lead to the loss of essential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Raphaël Mouravieff , Benjamin Piwowarski , Sylvain Lamprier