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Main Authors: Terrenzi, Riccardo, Falconi, Matteo, Ayvaz, Serkan, Plebani, Pierluigi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18199
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author Terrenzi, Riccardo
Falconi, Matteo
Ayvaz, Serkan
Plebani, Pierluigi
author_facet Terrenzi, Riccardo
Falconi, Matteo
Ayvaz, Serkan
Plebani, Pierluigi
contents The rapid growth of tabular datasets in data lakes, data spaces, and open data portals makes effective dataset search essential for reuse and analysis. Existing search systems rely mainly on metadata, which is often incomplete or low quality, especially for tables whose meaning depends on both schema and cell values. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable richer, content-based representations of tables. However, prior LLM-based retrieval methods have focused on Table Question Answering, where the goal is to select a single table to answer a question, rather than retrieve and rank relevant datasets. We propose PIPER, a content-driven retrieval method for tabular datasets that uses table profiles and LLM-generated queries embedded for dense retrieval. Designed for dataset search in poor-metadata settings, PIPER outperforms both classical metadata-based baselines and strong TableQA retrieval methods, demonstrating the value of LLM-based content modeling for tabular dataset search.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PIPER: Content-Based Table Search via profiling and LLM-Generated Pseudoqueries
Terrenzi, Riccardo
Falconi, Matteo
Ayvaz, Serkan
Plebani, Pierluigi
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid growth of tabular datasets in data lakes, data spaces, and open data portals makes effective dataset search essential for reuse and analysis. Existing search systems rely mainly on metadata, which is often incomplete or low quality, especially for tables whose meaning depends on both schema and cell values. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable richer, content-based representations of tables. However, prior LLM-based retrieval methods have focused on Table Question Answering, where the goal is to select a single table to answer a question, rather than retrieve and rank relevant datasets. We propose PIPER, a content-driven retrieval method for tabular datasets that uses table profiles and LLM-generated queries embedded for dense retrieval. Designed for dataset search in poor-metadata settings, PIPER outperforms both classical metadata-based baselines and strong TableQA retrieval methods, demonstrating the value of LLM-based content modeling for tabular dataset search.
title PIPER: Content-Based Table Search via profiling and LLM-Generated Pseudoqueries
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18199