@inproceedings{yang-etal-2022-tableformer,
title = "{T}able{F}ormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding",
author = "Yang, Jingfeng and
Gupta, Aditya and
Upadhyay, Shyam and
He, Luheng and
Goel, Rahul and
Paul, Shachi",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.40",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.40",
pages = "528--537",
abstract = "Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations. Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability. In this work, we propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer, where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biases. TableFormer is (1) strictly invariant to row and column orders, and, (2) could understand tables better due to its tabular inductive biases. Our evaluations showed that TableFormer outperforms strong baselines in all settings on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQA, especially when facing answer-invariant row and column order perturbations (6{\%} improvement over the best baseline), because previous SOTA models{'} performance drops by 4{\%} - 6{\%} when facing such perturbations while TableFormer is not affected.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="yang-etal-2022-tableformer">
<titleInfo>
<title>TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jingfeng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Aditya</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gupta</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shyam</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Upadhyay</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Luheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">He</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Rahul</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Goel</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shachi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Paul</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2022-05</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Smaranda</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Muresan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Preslav</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nakov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Aline</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Villavicencio</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Dublin, Ireland</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations. Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability. In this work, we propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer, where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biases. TableFormer is (1) strictly invariant to row and column orders, and, (2) could understand tables better due to its tabular inductive biases. Our evaluations showed that TableFormer outperforms strong baselines in all settings on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQA, especially when facing answer-invariant row and column order perturbations (6% improvement over the best baseline), because previous SOTA models’ performance drops by 4% - 6% when facing such perturbations while TableFormer is not affected.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">yang-etal-2022-tableformer</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.40</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.40</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2022-05</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>528</start>
<end>537</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding
%A Yang, Jingfeng
%A Gupta, Aditya
%A Upadhyay, Shyam
%A He, Luheng
%A Goel, Rahul
%A Paul, Shachi
%Y Muresan, Smaranda
%Y Nakov, Preslav
%Y Villavicencio, Aline
%S Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2022
%8 May
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Dublin, Ireland
%F yang-etal-2022-tableformer
%X Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations. Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability. In this work, we propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer, where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biases. TableFormer is (1) strictly invariant to row and column orders, and, (2) could understand tables better due to its tabular inductive biases. Our evaluations showed that TableFormer outperforms strong baselines in all settings on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQA, especially when facing answer-invariant row and column order perturbations (6% improvement over the best baseline), because previous SOTA models’ performance drops by 4% - 6% when facing such perturbations while TableFormer is not affected.
%R 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.40
%U https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.40
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.40
%P 528-537
Markdown (Informal)
[TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding](https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.40) (Yang et al., ACL 2022)
ACL
- Jingfeng Yang, Aditya Gupta, Shyam Upadhyay, Luheng He, Rahul Goel, and Shachi Paul. 2022. TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 528–537, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.