Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data Mining

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Chao, Lu, Guoshan, Wang, Haobo, Li, Liyao, Wu, Sai, Chen, Gang, Zhao, Junbo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Ye, Chao
Lu, Guoshan
Wang, Haobo
Li, Liyao
Wu, Sai
Chen, Gang
Zhao, Junbo
author_facet Ye, Chao
Lu, Guoshan
Wang, Haobo
Li, Liyao
Wu, Sai
Chen, Gang
Zhao, Junbo
contents Tabular data pervades the landscape of the World Wide Web, playing a foundational role in the digital architecture that underpins online information. Given the recent influence of large-scale pretrained models like ChatGPT and SAM across various domains, exploring the application of pretraining techniques for mining tabular data on the web has emerged as a highly promising research direction. Indeed, there have been some recent works around this topic where most (if not all) of them are limited in the scope of a fixed-schema/single table. Due to the scale of the dataset and the parameter size of the prior models, we believe that we have not reached the ''BERT moment'' for the ubiquitous tabular data. The development on this line significantly lags behind the counterpart research domains such as natural language processing. In this work, we first identify the crucial challenges behind tabular data pretraining, particularly overcoming the cross-table hurdle. As a pioneering endeavor, this work mainly (i)-contributes a high-quality real-world tabular dataset, (ii)-proposes an innovative, generic, and efficient cross-table pretraining framework, dubbed as CM2, where the core to it comprises a semantic-aware tabular neural network that uniformly encodes heterogeneous tables without much restriction and (iii)-introduces a novel pretraining objective -- prompt Masked Table Modeling (pMTM) -- inspired by NLP but intricately tailored to scalable pretraining on tables. Our extensive experiments demonstrate CM2's state-of-the-art performance and validate that cross-table pretraining can enhance various downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_04308
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data Mining
Ye, Chao
Lu, Guoshan
Wang, Haobo
Li, Liyao
Wu, Sai
Chen, Gang
Zhao, Junbo
Machine Learning
Tabular data pervades the landscape of the World Wide Web, playing a foundational role in the digital architecture that underpins online information. Given the recent influence of large-scale pretrained models like ChatGPT and SAM across various domains, exploring the application of pretraining techniques for mining tabular data on the web has emerged as a highly promising research direction. Indeed, there have been some recent works around this topic where most (if not all) of them are limited in the scope of a fixed-schema/single table. Due to the scale of the dataset and the parameter size of the prior models, we believe that we have not reached the ''BERT moment'' for the ubiquitous tabular data. The development on this line significantly lags behind the counterpart research domains such as natural language processing. In this work, we first identify the crucial challenges behind tabular data pretraining, particularly overcoming the cross-table hurdle. As a pioneering endeavor, this work mainly (i)-contributes a high-quality real-world tabular dataset, (ii)-proposes an innovative, generic, and efficient cross-table pretraining framework, dubbed as CM2, where the core to it comprises a semantic-aware tabular neural network that uniformly encodes heterogeneous tables without much restriction and (iii)-introduces a novel pretraining objective -- prompt Masked Table Modeling (pMTM) -- inspired by NLP but intricately tailored to scalable pretraining on tables. Our extensive experiments demonstrate CM2's state-of-the-art performance and validate that cross-table pretraining can enhance various downstream tasks.
title Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data Mining
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04308