# WTR: A Test Collection for Web Table Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02354 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02354/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FollowTable: A Benchmark for Instruction-Following Table Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00400/) (2026)
- [Polaris: Learning to Generate Table Descriptions from Retrieval Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17171/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We describe the development, characteristics and availability of a test collection for the task of Web table retrieval, which uses a large-scale Web Table Corpora extracted from the Common Crawl. Since a Web table usually has rich context information such as the page title and surrounding paragraphs, we not only provide relevance judgments of query-table pairs, but also the relevance judgments of query-table context pairs with respect to a query, which are ignored by previous test collections. To facilitate future research with this benchmark, we provide details about how the dataset is pre-processed and also baseline results from both traditional and recently proposed table retrieval methods. Our experimental results show that proper usage of context labels can benefit previous table retrieval methods.