# gTBLS: Generating Tables from Text by Conditional Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14457 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14457/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11476/) (2019)
- [Data Synthesis based on Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03384/) (2018)
- [Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12773/) (2020)
- [Multi-View Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Conversational Structure for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01672/) (2020)
- [Dr. Summarize: Global Summarization of Medical Dialogue by Exploiting Local Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08666/) (2020)
- [Text-to-Table: A New Way of Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02707/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Abstractive Meeting Summarization with Multi-Sentence Compression and Budgeted Submodular Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05271/) (2018)
- [Table-to-Text: Describing Table Region with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11234/) (2018)
- [Language Model is All You Need: Natural Language Understanding as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03023/) (2020)
- [HybriDialogue: An Information-Seeking Dialogue Dataset Grounded on Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13243/) (2022)
- [STable: Table Generation Framework for Encoder-Decoder Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04045/) (2022)
- [Improved and Efficient Conversational Slot Labeling through Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02123/) (2022)
- [mForms : Multimodal Form-Filling with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12340/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14215/) (2024)
- [arXiv2Table: Toward Realistic Benchmarking and Evaluation for LLM-Based Literature-Review Table Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10284/) (2025)
- [Map&Make: Schema Guided Text to Table Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23174/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Evaluating Quality and Trustworthiness in LLM-Generated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17717/) (2026)
- [Intent-Aware Schema Generation And Refinement For Literature Review Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19521/) (2025)
- [SQUiD: Synthesizing Relational Databases from Unstructured Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19025/) (2025)
- [Spoken Conversational Agents with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02593/) (2025)
- [iTBLS: A Dataset of Interactive Conversations Over Tabular Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12580/) (2024)
- [Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation for Agentic AI with a Universal Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12257/) (2025)
- [LLM driven Text-to-Table Generation through Sub-Tasks Guidance and Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08653/) (2025)
- [Beyond Isolated Dots: Benchmarking Structured Table Construction as Deep Knowledge Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16271/) (2025)
- [Moneyball with LLMs: Analyzing Tabular Summarization in Sports Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18173/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distilling large, unstructured text into a structured, condensed form such as tables is an open research problem. One of the primary challenges in automatically generating tables is ensuring their syntactic validity. Prior approaches address this challenge by including additional parameters in the Transformer's attention mechanism to attend to specific rows and column headers. In contrast to this single-stage method, this paper presents a two-stage approach called Generative Tables (gTBLS). The first stage infers table structure (row and column headers) from the text. The second stage formulates questions using these headers and fine-tunes a causal language model to answer them. Furthermore, the gTBLS approach is amenable to the utilization of pre-trained Large Language Models in a zero-shot configuration, presenting a solution for table generation in situations where fine-tuning is not feasible. gTBLS improves prior approaches by up to 10% in BERTScore on the table construction task and up to 20% on the table content generation task of the E2E, WikiTableText, WikiBio, and RotoWire datasets.