mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Enhancing Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Semi-structured Tables

arXiv 2407.16030 ↗First posted 22 Jul 2024cs.CL cs.AI cs.DBcited by 8

On the map: LLM reasoning → Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal reasoning over tabular data presents substantial challenges for large language models (LLMs), as evidenced by recent research. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of temporal datasets to pinpoint the specific limitations of LLMs. Our investigation leads to enhancements in TempTabQA, a dataset specifically designed for tabular temporal question answering. We provide critical insights for improving LLM performance in temporal reasoning tasks with tabular data. Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach, C.L.E.A.R to strengthen LLM capabilities in this domain. Our findings demonstrate that our method significantly improves evidence-based reasoning across various models. Additionally, our experimental results reveal that indirect supervision with auxiliary data substantially boosts model performance in these tasks. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of LLMs' temporal reasoning abilities over tabular data and promotes advancements in their application across diverse fields.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 43 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2024.

Builds on

43 of 66 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding9 Jan
  2. 2023Towards Robust Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via a Multi-Hop QA Dataset and Pseudo-Instruction Tuning16 Nov
  3. 2023Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers: Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning31 Jan
  4. 2022Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners13 Oct

Other references · 39

  1. 2018Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Taskcited by 1,120
  2. 2022Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Taskscited by 1,057
  3. 2015Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tablescited by 509
  4. 2020TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-trainingcited by 432
  5. 2019TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verificationcited by 425
  6. 2020TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Datacited by 395
  7. 2021Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Basescited by 290
  8. 2023Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 285
  9. 2020ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Datasetcited by 267
  10. 2020HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Datacited by 263
  11. 2022Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languagescited by 224
  12. 2020Open Question Answering over Tables and Textcited by 163
27 more
  1. 2021A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 150
  2. 2021SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QAcited by 145
  3. 2020DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generationcited by 144
  4. 2020Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsingcited by 133
  5. 2021TABBIE: Pretrained Representations of Tabular Datacited by 111
  6. 2021Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphscited by 99
  7. 2020Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tablescited by 90
  8. 2020INFOTABS: Inference on Tables as Semi-structured Datacited by 84
  9. 2021Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphscited by 69
  10. 2020Understanding tables with intermediate pre-trainingcited by 68
  11. 2020TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questionscited by 65
  12. 2019TEQUILA: Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 47
  13. 2021Turning Tables: Generating Examples from Semi-structured Tables for Endowing Language Models with Reasoning Skillscited by 39
  14. 2021FRUIT: Faithfully Reflecting Updated Information in Textcited by 39
  15. 2019Table2Vec: Neural Word and Entity Embeddings for Table Population and Retrievalcited by 37
  16. 2021Capturing Row and Column Semantics in Transformer Based Question Answering over Tablescited by 31
  17. 2023TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tablescited by 27
  18. 2021TempoQR: Temporal Question Reasoning over Knowledge Graphscited by 26
  19. 2024Evaluating LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning in Financial Document Question Answeringcited by 25
  20. 2019CogCompTime: A Tool for Understanding Time in Natural Language Textcited by 23
  21. 2021Incorporating External Knowledge to Enhance Tabular Reasoningcited by 23
  22. 2021Representations for Question Answering from Documents with Tables and Textcited by 21
  23. 2020Summarizing and Exploring Tabular Data in Conversational Searchcited by 19
  24. 2019Auto-completion for Data Cells in Relational Tablescited by 9
  25. 2021Is My Model Using The Right Evidence? Systematic Probes for Examining Evidence-Based Tabular Reasoningcited by 9
  26. 2022A Benchmark for Generalizable and Interpretable Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 9
  27. 2022Targeted Extraction of Temporal Facts from Textual Resources for Improved Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Basescited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2025: 8.

8 papers.

  1. 2025It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answeringcited by 12
  2. 2025RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysiscited by 12
  3. 2025EHRStruct: A Comprehensive Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models on Structured Electronic Health Record Taskscited by 5
  4. 2025TransientTables: Evaluating LLMs' Reasoning on Temporally Evolving Semi-structured Tablescited by 4
  5. 2025Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluationcited by 4
  6. 2025No Universal Prompt: Unifying Reasoning through Adaptive Prompting for Temporal Table Reasoningcited by 1
  7. 2025Time to Revist Exact Matchcited by 0
  8. 2025Evidence-Guided Schema Normalization for Temporal Tabular Reasoningcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025LLM-Symbolic Integration for Robust Temporal Tabular Reasoning
  2. 2024Test of Time: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Temporal Reasoning
  3. 2025How well do LLMs reason over tabular data, really?
  4. 2025Utilizing Training Data to Improve LLM Reasoning for Tabular Understanding
  5. 2025On the Temporal Question-Answering Capabilities of Large Language Models Over Anonymized Data
  6. 2024TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition
  7. 2023TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning
  8. 2024A Survey of Table Reasoning with Large Language Models