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Summarizing and Exploring Tabular Data in Conversational Search

Published: 25 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Tabular data provide answers to a significant portion of search queries. However, reciting an entire result table is impractical in conversational search systems. We propose to generate natural language summaries as answers to describe the complex information contained in a table. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we build a new conversation-oriented, open-domain table summarization dataset. It includes annotated table summaries, which not only answer questions but also help people explore other information in the table. We utilize this dataset to develop automatic table summarization systems as SOTA baselines. Based on the experimental results, we identify challenges and point out future research directions that this resource will support.

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MP4 File (3397271.3401205.mp4)
Tabular data provide answers to a significant portion of search queries. However, reciting an entire result table is impractical in conversational search systems.\r\nWe propose to generate natural language summaries as answers to describe the complex information contained in a table.\r\nThrough crowdsourcing experiments, we build a new conversation-oriented, open-domain table summarization dataset. It includes annotated table summaries, which not only answer questions but also help people explore other information in the table. \r\nWe utilize this dataset to develop automatic table summarization systems as SOTA baselines. \r\nBased on the experimental results, we identify challenges and point out future research directions that this resource will support.

References

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Cited By

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  • (2024)From Detection to Application: Recent Advances in Understanding Scientific Tables and FiguresACM Computing Surveys10.1145/365728556:10(1-39)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table TasksProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549792:3(1-28)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
  • (2024)Flexible and Adaptable Summarization via Expertise SeparationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657789(2018-2027)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '20: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    July 2020
    2548 pages
    ISBN:9781450380164
    DOI:10.1145/3397271
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 July 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. conversational systems
    2. table navigation
    3. table summarization
    4. table understanding

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    • National Science Foundation (NSF) grant IIS-1815528

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)From Detection to Application: Recent Advances in Understanding Scientific Tables and FiguresACM Computing Surveys10.1145/365728556:10(1-39)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table TasksProceedings of the ACM on Management of Data10.1145/36549792:3(1-28)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
    • (2024)Flexible and Adaptable Summarization via Expertise SeparationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657789(2018-2027)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Toward Connecting Speech Acts and Search Actions in Conversational Search TasksProceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00027(119-131)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
    • (2024)MGCoT: Multi-Grained Contextual Transformer for table-based text generationExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123742250(123742)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2023)Multi-head attention based candidate segment selection in QA over hybrid dataIntelligent Data Analysis10.3233/IDA-22703227:6(1839-1852)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2023
    • (2022)Table understanding: Problem overviewWIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery10.1002/widm.148213:1Online publication date: 21-Nov-2022
    • (2021)Semi-Supervised Variational Reasoning for Medical Dialogue GenerationProceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3404835.3462921(544-554)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2021
    • (2021)Towards Multi-Modal Conversational Information SeekingProceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3404835.3462806(1577-1587)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2021
    • (2021)Towards Scientific Data Synthesis Using Deep Learning and Semantic WebThe Semantic Web: ESWC 2021 Satellite Events10.1007/978-3-030-80418-3_10(54-59)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2021

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