Tab2Text - A framework for deep learning with tabular data

Tong Lin, Jason Yan, David Jurgens, Sabina Tomkins


Abstract
Tabular data, from public opinion surveys to records of interactions with social services, is foundational to the social sciences. One application of such data is to fit supervised learning models in order to predict consequential outcomes, for example: whether a family is likely to be evicted, whether a student will graduate from high school or is at risk of dropping out, and whether a voter will turn out in an upcoming election. While supervised learning has seen drastic improvements in performance with advancements in deep learning technology, these gains are largely lost on tabular data which poses unique difficulties for deep learning frameworks. We propose a technique for transforming tabular data to text data and demonstrate the extent to which this technique can improve the performance of deep learning models for tabular data. Overall, we find modest gains (1.5% on average). Interestingly, we find that these gains do not depend on using large language models to generate text.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.756
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:
12925–12935
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.756
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tong Lin, Jason Yan, David Jurgens, and Sabina Tomkins. 2024. Tab2Text - A framework for deep learning with tabular data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12925–12935, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tab2Text - A framework for deep learning with tabular data (Lin et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.756.pdf