# Open-WikiTable: Dataset for Open Domain Question Answering with Complex Reasoning over Table

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07288/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [Open Question Answering over Tables and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10439/) (2020)
- [Style Transfer Through Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09000/) (2018)
- [Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05169/) (2021)
- [Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12011/) (2021)
- [On the Potential of Lexico-logical Alignments for Semantic Parsing to SQL Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11246/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal Retrieval of Tables and Texts Using Tri-encoder Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04049/) (2021)
- [Table Retrieval May Not Necessitate Table-specific Model Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09843/) (2022)
- [CLTR: An End-to-End, Transformer-Based System for Cell Level Table Retrieval and Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04441/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [MiroThinker: Pushing the Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Research Agents via Model, Context, and Interactive Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11793/) (2025)
- [VDocRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Visually-Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09795/) (2025)
- [Benchmark Test-Time Scaling of General LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18998/) (2026)
- [OpenTab: Advancing Large Language Models as Open-domain Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14361/) (2024)
- [M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18778/) (2025)
- [TQA-Bench: Evaluating LLMs for Multi-Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19504/) (2024)
- [HomeBench: Evaluating LLMs in Smart Homes with Valid and Invalid Instructions Across Single and Multiple Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19628/) (2025)
- [Skip-Vision: Efficient and Scalable Acceleration of Vision-Language Models via Adaptive Token Skipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21817/) (2025)
- [Tabular Data Understanding with LLMs: A Survey of Recent Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00217/) (2025)
- [MMTABREAL: Real-World Benchmark for Multimodal Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21771/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Clean Up Your Mess? A Survey of Application-Ready Data Preparation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17058/) (2026)
- [Granite Embedding R2 Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21085/) (2025)
- [TableMoE: Neuro-Symbolic Routing for Structured Expert Reasoning in Multimodal Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21393/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Interleaved Document Representation for Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02729/) (2024)
- [Mixture-of-Retrieval Experts for Reasoning-Guided Multimodal Knowledge Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22095/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Query: Unleashing the Power of LLMs in SQL-Aided Table Understanding via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15809/) (2025)
- [Database-Augmented Query Representation for Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16013/) (2024)
- [UniHGKR: Unified Instruction-aware Heterogeneous Knowledge Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20163/) (2024)
- [Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09671/) (2025)
- [HKRAG: Holistic Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Generation Over Visually-Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20227/) (2025)
- [RETQA: A Large-Scale Open-Domain Tabular Question Answering Dataset for Real Estate Sector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10104/) (2024)
- [Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01556/) (2025)
- [Semantically Aligned Question and Code Generation for Automated Insight Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01556/) (2024)
- [MegaWika 2: A More Comprehensive Multilingual Collection of Articles and their Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03828/) (2025)
- [PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15966/) (2025)
- [Are We Asking the Right Questions? On Ambiguity in Natural Language Queries for Tabular Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04584/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Open-Domain Table Question Answering via Syntax- and Structure-aware Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10506/) (2023)
- [AraTable: Benchmarking LLMs' Reasoning and Understanding of Arabic Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18442/) (2025)
- [Team Anotheroption at SemEval-2025 Task 8: Bridging the Gap Between Open-Source and Proprietary LLMs in Table QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09657/) (2025)
- [What to Keep and What to Drop: Adaptive Table Filtering Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23463/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent interest in open domain question answering (ODQA) over tables, many studies still rely on datasets that are not truly optimal for the task with respect to utilizing structural nature of table. These datasets assume answers reside as a single cell value and do not necessitate exploring over multiple cells such as aggregation, comparison, and sorting. Thus, we release Open-WikiTable, the first ODQA dataset that requires complex reasoning over tables. Open-WikiTable is built upon WikiSQL and WikiTableQuestions to be applicable in the open-domain setting. As each question is coupled with both textual answers and SQL queries, Open-WikiTable opens up a wide range of possibilities for future research, as both reader and parser methods can be applied. The dataset and code are publicly available.
