Towards Question Answering over Large Semi-structured Tables

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yuxiang, Gan, Junhao, Qi, Jianzhong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yuxiang
Gan, Junhao
Qi, Jianzhong
author_facet Wang, Yuxiang
Gan, Junhao
Qi, Jianzhong
contents Table Question Answering (TableQA) attracts strong interests due to the prevalence of web information presented in the form of semi-structured tables. Despite many efforts, TableQA over large tables remains an open challenge. This is because large tables may overwhelm models that try to comprehend them in full to locate question answers. Recent studies reduce input table size by decomposing tables into smaller, question-relevant sub-tables via generating programs to parse the tables. However, such solutions are subject to program generation and execution errors and are difficult to ensure decomposition quality. To address this issue, we propose TaDRe, a TableQA model that incorporates both pre- and post-table decomposition refinements to ensure table decomposition quality, hence achieving highly accurate TableQA results. To evaluate TaDRe, we construct two new large-table TableQA benchmarks via LLM-driven table expansion and QA pair generation. Extensive experiments on both the new and public benchmarks show that TaDRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-table TableQA tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13422
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Question Answering over Large Semi-structured Tables
Wang, Yuxiang
Gan, Junhao
Qi, Jianzhong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Table Question Answering (TableQA) attracts strong interests due to the prevalence of web information presented in the form of semi-structured tables. Despite many efforts, TableQA over large tables remains an open challenge. This is because large tables may overwhelm models that try to comprehend them in full to locate question answers. Recent studies reduce input table size by decomposing tables into smaller, question-relevant sub-tables via generating programs to parse the tables. However, such solutions are subject to program generation and execution errors and are difficult to ensure decomposition quality. To address this issue, we propose TaDRe, a TableQA model that incorporates both pre- and post-table decomposition refinements to ensure table decomposition quality, hence achieving highly accurate TableQA results. To evaluate TaDRe, we construct two new large-table TableQA benchmarks via LLM-driven table expansion and QA pair generation. Extensive experiments on both the new and public benchmarks show that TaDRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-table TableQA tasks.
title Towards Question Answering over Large Semi-structured Tables
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13422