Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval

Jonathan Herzig, Thomas Müller, Syrine Krichene, Julian Eisenschlos


Abstract
Recent advances in open-domain QA have led to strong models based on dense retrieval, but only focused on retrieving textual passages. In this work, we tackle open-domain QA over tables for the first time, and show that retrieval can be improved by a retriever designed to handle tabular context. We present an effective pre-training procedure for our retriever and improve retrieval quality with mined hard negatives. As relevant datasets are missing, we extract a subset of Natural Questions (Kwiatkowski et al., 2019) into a Table QA dataset. We find that our retriever improves retrieval results from 72.0 to 81.1 recall@10 and end-to-end QA results from 33.8 to 37.7 exact match, over a BERT based retriever.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
512–519
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.43
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.43
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Herzig, Thomas Müller, Syrine Krichene, and Julian Eisenschlos. 2021. Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 512–519, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval (Herzig et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.43.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.43.mp4
Code
 google-research/tapas
Data
Natural Questions