Theme-Explanation Structure for Table Summarization using Large Language Models: A Case Study on Korean Tabular Data

TaeYoon Kwack, Jisoo Kim, Ki Yong Jung, DongGeon Lee, Heesun Park


Abstract
Tables are a primary medium for conveying critical information in administrative domains, yet their complexity hinders utilization by Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper introduces the Theme-Explanation Structure-based Table Summarization (Tabular-TX) pipeline, a novel approach designed to generate highly interpretable summaries from tabular data, with a specific focus on Korean administrative documents. Current table summarization methods often neglect the crucial aspect of human-friendly output. Tabular-TX addresses this by first employing a multi-step reasoning process to ensure deep table comprehension by LLMs, followed by a journalist persona prompting strategy for clear sentence generation. Crucially, it then structures the output into a Theme Part (an adverbial phrase) and an Explanation Part (a predicative clause), significantly enhancing readability. Our approach leverages in-context learning, obviating the need for extensive fine-tuning and associated labeled data or computational resources. Experimental results show that Tabular-TX effectively processes complex table structures and metadata, offering a robust and efficient solution for generating human-centric table summaries, especially in low-resource scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.trl-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Table Representation Learning Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Shuaichen Chang, Madelon Hulsebos, Qian Liu, Wenhu Chen, Huan Sun
Venues:
TRL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
1–12
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.trl-1.1/
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Cite (ACL):
TaeYoon Kwack, Jisoo Kim, Ki Yong Jung, DongGeon Lee, and Heesun Park. 2025. Theme-Explanation Structure for Table Summarization using Large Language Models: A Case Study on Korean Tabular Data. In Proceedings of the 4th Table Representation Learning Workshop, pages 1–12, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Theme-Explanation Structure for Table Summarization using Large Language Models: A Case Study on Korean Tabular Data (Kwack et al., TRL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.trl-1.1.pdf