Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Exploring Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval

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Autori principali: Chen, Peter Baile, Zhang, Yi, Roth, Dan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Chen, Peter Baile
Zhang, Yi
Roth, Dan
author_facet Chen, Peter Baile
Zhang, Yi
Roth, Dan
contents Retrieving relevant tables containing the necessary information to accurately answer a given question over tables is critical to open-domain question-answering (QA) systems. Previous methods assume the answer to such a question can be found either in a single table or multiple tables identified through question decomposition or rewriting. However, neither of these approaches is sufficient, as many questions require retrieving multiple tables and joining them through a join plan that cannot be discerned from the user query itself. If the join plan is not considered in the retrieval stage, the subsequent steps of reasoning and answering based on those retrieved tables are likely to be incorrect. To address this problem, we introduce a method that uncovers useful join relations for any query and database during table retrieval. We use a novel re-ranking method formulated as a mixed-integer program that considers not only table-query relevance but also table-table relevance that requires inferring join relationships. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for table retrieval by up to 9.3% in F1 score and for end-to-end QA by up to 5.4% in accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_09889
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Exploring Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval
Chen, Peter Baile
Zhang, Yi
Roth, Dan
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Retrieving relevant tables containing the necessary information to accurately answer a given question over tables is critical to open-domain question-answering (QA) systems. Previous methods assume the answer to such a question can be found either in a single table or multiple tables identified through question decomposition or rewriting. However, neither of these approaches is sufficient, as many questions require retrieving multiple tables and joining them through a join plan that cannot be discerned from the user query itself. If the join plan is not considered in the retrieval stage, the subsequent steps of reasoning and answering based on those retrieved tables are likely to be incorrect. To address this problem, we introduce a method that uncovers useful join relations for any query and database during table retrieval. We use a novel re-ranking method formulated as a mixed-integer program that considers not only table-query relevance but also table-table relevance that requires inferring join relationships. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for table retrieval by up to 9.3% in F1 score and for end-to-end QA by up to 5.4% in accuracy.
title Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Exploring Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09889