TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables

Vivek Gupta, Pranshu Kandoi, Mahek Vora, Shuo Zhang, Yujie He, Ridho Reinanda, Vivek Srikumar


Abstract
Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TEMPTABQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.149
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:
2431–2453
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.149
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.149
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivek Gupta, Pranshu Kandoi, Mahek Vora, Shuo Zhang, Yujie He, Ridho Reinanda, and Vivek Srikumar. 2023. TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2431–2453, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables (Gupta et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.149.pdf