# DocTabQA: Answering Questions from Long Documents Using Tables

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11490/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [QuAC : Question Answering in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07036/) (2018)
- [Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11755/) (2022)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14283/) (2023)
- [Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07678/) (2023)
- [TUTA: Tree-based Transformers for Generally Structured Table Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12537/) (2020)
- [AnglE-optimized Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12871/) (2023)
- [Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01225/) (2022)
- [Effective Modeling of Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09886/) (2019)

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

- [HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02959/) (2024)
- [NeedleInATable: Exploring Long-Context Capability of Large Language Models towards Long-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06560/) (2025)
- [Toward Real-World Table Agents: Capabilities, Workflows, and Design Principles for LLM-based Table Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10281/) (2025)
- [QBD-RankedDataGen: Generating Custom Ranked Datasets for Improving Query-By-Document Search Using LLM-Reranking with Reduced Human Effort](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04732/) (2025)
- [Beyond Isolated Dots: Benchmarking Structured Table Construction as Deep Knowledge Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16271/) (2025)
- [UniFinEval: Towards Unified Evaluation of Financial Multimodal Models across Text, Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22162/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study a new problem setting of question answering (QA), referred to as DocTabQA. Within this setting, given a long document, the goal is to respond to questions by organizing the answers into structured tables derived directly from the document's content. Unlike traditional QA approaches which predominantly rely on unstructured text to formulate responses, DocTabQA aims to leverage structured tables as answers to convey information clearly and systematically, thereby enhancing user comprehension and highlighting relationships between data points. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been previously explored. In this paper, we introduce the QTabA dataset, encompassing 300 financial documents, accompanied by manually annotated 1.5k question-table pairs. Initially, we leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to establish a baseline. However, it is widely acknowledged that LLMs encounter difficulties when tasked with generating intricate, structured outputs from long input sequences. To overcome these challenges, we present a two-stage framework, called DocTabTalk, which initially retrieves relevant sentences from extensive documents and subsequently generates hierarchical tables based on these identified sentences. DocTabTalk incorporates two key technological innovations: AlignLLaMA and TabTalk, which are specifically tailored to assist GPT-4 in tackling DocTabQA, enabling it to generate well-structured, hierarchical tables with improved organization and clarity. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on both QTabA and RotoWire datasets demonstrate that our DocTabTalk significantly enhances the performances of the GPT-4 in our proposed DocTabQA task and the table generation task. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SmileWHC/DocTabQA for further research.