# Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07347/) (2020)
- [TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07653/) (2021)
- [MultiModalQA: Complex Question Answering over Text, Tables and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06039/) (2021)
- [FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00369/) (2021)
- [GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13845/) (2020)
- [Open Question Answering over Tables and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10439/) (2020)
- [Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12773/) (2020)
- [Handling Divergent Reference Texts when Evaluating Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01081/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06710/) (2022)
- [KG-BART: Knowledge Graph-Augmented BART for Generative Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12677/) (2020)
- [Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00020/) (2016)
- [Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12011/) (2021)
- [BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GCN and BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05727/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19318/) (2024)
- [kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10771/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Table Representations to Answer Questions from Tables in Documents : A Case Study using 3GPP Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17008/) (2024)
- [PanelTR: Zero-Shot Table Reasoning Framework Through Multi-Agent Scientific Discussion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06110/) (2025)
- [TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03660/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Question answering on tabular data (a.k.a TableQA), which aims at generating answers to questions grounded on a provided table, has gained significant attention recently. Prior work primarily produces concise factual responses through information extraction from individual or limited table cells, lacking the ability to reason across diverse table cells. Yet, the realm of free-form TableQA, which demands intricate strategies for selecting relevant table cells and the sophisticated integration and inference of discrete data fragments, remains mostly unexplored. To this end, this paper proposes a generalized three-stage approach: Table-to- Graph conversion and cell localizing, external knowledge retrieval, and the fusion of table and text (called TAG-QA), to address the challenge of inferring long free-form answers in generative TableQA. In particular, TAG-QA (1) locates relevant table cells using a graph neural network to gather intersecting cells between relevant rows and columns, (2) leverages external knowledge from Wikipedia, and (3) generates answers by integrating both tabular data and natural linguistic information. Experiments showcase the superior capabilities of TAG-QA in generating sentences that are both faithful and coherent, particularly when compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, TAG-QA surpasses the robust pipeline-based baseline TAPAS by 17% and 14% in terms of BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively. Furthermore, TAG-QA outperforms the end-to-end model T5 by 16% and 12% on BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively.