CRT-QA: A Dataset of Complex Reasoning Question Answering over Tabular Data

Zhehao Zhang, Xitao Li, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) show powerful reasoning abilities on various text-based tasks. However, their reasoning capability on structured data such as tables has not been systematically explored. In this work, we first establish a comprehensive taxonomy of reasoning and operation types for tabular data analysis. Then, we construct a complex reasoning QA dataset over tabular data, named CRT-QA dataset (Complex Reasoning QA over Tabular data), with the following unique features: (1) it is the first Table QA dataset with multi-step operation and informal reasoning; (2) it contains fine-grained annotations on questions’ directness, composition types of sub-questions, and human reasoning paths which can be used to conduct a thorough investigation on LLMs’ reasoning ability; (3) it contains a collection of unanswerable and indeterminate questions that commonly arise in real-world situations. We further introduce an efficient and effective tool-augmented method, named ARC (Auto-exemplar-guided Reasoning with Code), to use external tools such as Pandas to solve table reasoning tasks without handcrafted demonstrations. The experiment results show that CRT-QA presents a strong challenge for baseline methods and ARC achieves the best result.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.132
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2131–2153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.132
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.132
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhehao Zhang, Xitao Li, Yan Gao, and Jian-Guang Lou. 2023. CRT-QA: A Dataset of Complex Reasoning Question Answering over Tabular Data. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2131–2153, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CRT-QA: A Dataset of Complex Reasoning Question Answering over Tabular Data (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.132.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.132.mp4