Language Modeling on Tabular Data: A Survey of Foundations, Techniques and Evolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ruan, Yucheng, Lan, Xiang, Ma, Jingying, Dong, Yizhi, He, Kai, Feng, Mengling
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ruan, Yucheng
Lan, Xiang
Ma, Jingying
Dong, Yizhi
He, Kai
Feng, Mengling
author_facet Ruan, Yucheng
Lan, Xiang
Ma, Jingying
Dong, Yizhi
He, Kai
Feng, Mengling
contents Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_10548
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Modeling on Tabular Data: A Survey of Foundations, Techniques and Evolution
Ruan, Yucheng
Lan, Xiang
Ma, Jingying
Dong, Yizhi
He, Kai
Feng, Mengling
Computation and Language
Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.
title Language Modeling on Tabular Data: A Survey of Foundations, Techniques and Evolution
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10548