Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pang, Chaoxu, Cao, Yixuan, Yang, Chunhao, Luo, Ping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914827597774848
author Pang, Chaoxu
Cao, Yixuan
Yang, Chunhao
Luo, Ping
author_facet Pang, Chaoxu
Cao, Yixuan
Yang, Chunhao
Luo, Ping
contents Tables are recognized for their high information density and widespread usage, serving as essential sources of information. Seeking information from tables (TIS) is a crucial capability for Large Language Models (LLMs), serving as the foundation of knowledge-based Q&A systems. However, this field presently suffers from an absence of thorough and reliable evaluation. This paper introduces a more reliable benchmark for Table Information Seeking (TabIS). To avoid the unreliable evaluation caused by text similarity-based metrics, TabIS adopts a single-choice question format (with two options per question) instead of a text generation format. We establish an effective pipeline for generating options, ensuring their difficulty and quality. Experiments conducted on 12 LLMs reveal that while the performance of GPT-4-turbo is marginally satisfactory, both other proprietary and open-source models perform inadequately. Further analysis shows that LLMs exhibit a poor understanding of table structures, and struggle to balance between TIS performance and robustness against pseudo-relevant tables (common in retrieval-augmented systems). These findings uncover the limitations and potential challenges of LLMs in seeking information from tables. We release our data and code to facilitate further research in this field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_04113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables
Pang, Chaoxu
Cao, Yixuan
Yang, Chunhao
Luo, Ping
Computation and Language
Tables are recognized for their high information density and widespread usage, serving as essential sources of information. Seeking information from tables (TIS) is a crucial capability for Large Language Models (LLMs), serving as the foundation of knowledge-based Q&A systems. However, this field presently suffers from an absence of thorough and reliable evaluation. This paper introduces a more reliable benchmark for Table Information Seeking (TabIS). To avoid the unreliable evaluation caused by text similarity-based metrics, TabIS adopts a single-choice question format (with two options per question) instead of a text generation format. We establish an effective pipeline for generating options, ensuring their difficulty and quality. Experiments conducted on 12 LLMs reveal that while the performance of GPT-4-turbo is marginally satisfactory, both other proprietary and open-source models perform inadequately. Further analysis shows that LLMs exhibit a poor understanding of table structures, and struggle to balance between TIS performance and robustness against pseudo-relevant tables (common in retrieval-augmented systems). These findings uncover the limitations and potential challenges of LLMs in seeking information from tables. We release our data and code to facilitate further research in this field.
title Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04113