Generation-Focused Table-Based Intermediate Pre-training for Free-Form Question Answering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Question answering over semi-structured tables has attracted significant attention in the NLP community. However, most of the existing work focus on questions that can be answered with short-form answer, i.e. the answer is often a table cell or aggregation of multiple cells. This can mismatch with the intents of users who want to ask more complex questions that require free-form answers such as explanations. To bridge the gap, most recently, pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models such as T5 are used for generating free-form answers based on the question and table inputs. However, these pre-trained language models have weaker encoding abilities over table cells and schema. To mitigate this issue, in this work, we present an intermediate pre-training framework, Generation-focused Table-based Intermediate Pre-training (GENTAP), that jointly learns representations of natural language questions and tables. GENTAP learns to generate via two training objectives to enhance the question understanding and table representation abilities for complex questions. Based on experimental results, models that leverage GENTAP framework outperform the existing baselines on FETAQA benchmark. The pre-trained models are not only useful for free-form question answering, but also for few-shot data-to-text generation task, thus showing good transfer ability by obtaining new state-of-the-art results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".