# Towards Question Answering over Large Semi-structured Tables

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07347/) (2020)
- [LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08468/) (2023)
- [TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07653/) (2021)
- [Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02875/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers: Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13808/) (2023)
- [TUTA: Tree-based Transformers for Generally Structured Table Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12537/) (2020)
- [On the Potential of Lexico-logical Alignments for Semantic Parsing to SQL Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11246/) (2020)
- [TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04739/) (2024)
- [TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10150/) (2024)
- [OpenTab: Advancing Large Language Models as Open-domain Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14361/) (2024)
- [CABINET: Content Relevance based Noise Reduction for Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01155/) (2024)
- [Accurate and Regret-aware Numerical Problem Solver for Tabular Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12846/) (2024)
- [SynTQA: Synergistic Table-based Question Answering via Mixture of Text-to-SQL and E2E TQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16682/) (2024)
- [Learning to Reduce: Towards Improving Performance of Large Language Models on Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02750/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GLEAN: Grounded Lightweight Evaluation Anchors for Contamination-Aware Tabular Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02212/) (2026)
- [PARTAB: Partition-Aware Reasoning with Structured Evidence for Scalable Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Table Question Answering (TableQA) attracts strong interests due to the prevalence of web information presented in the form of semi-structured tables. Despite many efforts, TableQA over large tables remains an open challenge. This is because large tables may overwhelm models that try to comprehend them in full to locate question answers. Recent studies reduce input table size by decomposing tables into smaller, question-relevant sub-tables via generating programs to parse the tables. However, such solutions are subject to program generation and execution errors and are difficult to ensure decomposition quality. To address this issue, we propose TaDRe, a TableQA model that incorporates both pre- and post-table decomposition refinements to ensure table decomposition quality, hence achieving highly accurate TableQA results. To evaluate TaDRe, we construct two new large-table TableQA benchmarks via LLM-driven table expansion and QA pair generation. Extensive experiments on both the new and public benchmarks show that TaDRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-table TableQA tasks.