Unveiling Implicit Table Knowledge with Question-Then-Pinpoint Reasoner for Insightful Table Summarization

Kwangwook Seo, Jinyoung Yeo, Dongha Lee


Abstract
Implicit knowledge hidden within the explicit table cells, such as data insights, is the key to generating a high-quality table summary. However, unveiling such implicit knowledge is a non-trivial task. Due to the complex nature of structured tables, it is challenging even for large language models (LLMs) to mine the implicit knowledge in an insightful and faithful manner. To address this challenge, we propose a novel table reasoning framework Question-then-Pinpoint. Our work focuses on building a plug-and-play table reasoner that can self-question the insightful knowledge and answer it by faithfully pinpointing evidence on the table to provide explainable guidance for the summarizer. To train a reliable reasoner, we collect table knowledge by guiding a teacher LLM to follow the coarse-to-fine reasoning paths and refine it through two quality enhancement strategies to selectively distill the high-quality knowledge to the reasoner. Extensive experiments on two table summarization datasets, including our newly proposed InsTaSumm, validate the general effectiveness of our framework.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.719
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12337–12362
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.719
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kwangwook Seo, Jinyoung Yeo, and Dongha Lee. 2024. Unveiling Implicit Table Knowledge with Question-Then-Pinpoint Reasoner for Insightful Table Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12337–12362, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unveiling Implicit Table Knowledge with Question-Then-Pinpoint Reasoner for Insightful Table Summarization (Seo et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.719.pdf
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 2024.findings-emnlp.719.software.zip