Long-form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) requires systems to generate paragraph long and complex answers to questions over tabular data. While Large language models based systems have made significant progress, it often hallucinates, especially when the task involves complex reasoning over tables. To tackle this issue, we propose a new LLM-based framework, TaPERA, for LFTQA tasks. Our framework uses a modular approach that decomposes the whole process into three sub-modules: 1) QA-based Content Planner that iteratively decomposes the input question into sub-questions; 2) Execution-based Table Reasoner that produces executable Python program for each sub-question; and 3) Answer Generator that generates long-form answer grounded on the program output. Human evaluation results on the FeTaQA and QTSumm datasets indicate that our framework significantly improves strong baselines on both accuracy and truthfulness, as our modular framework is better at table reasoning, and the long-form answer is always consistent with the program output. Our modular design further provides transparency as users are able to interact with our framework by manually changing the content plans.

We introduce FinanceMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in solving knowledge-intensive math reasoning problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, FinanceMath includes 1,200 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content. These problems require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. We also construct a finance-domain knowledge bank and investigate various knowledge integration strategies. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 44 LLMs with both Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods. Our experimental results reveal that the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) achieves only 60.9% accuracy using CoT prompting, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, while augmenting LLMs with external knowledge can improve model performance (e.g., from 47.5% to 54.5% for Gemini-1.5-Pro), their accuracy remains significantly lower than the estimated human expert performance of 92%. We believe that FinanceMath can advance future research in the area of domain-specific knowledge retrieval and integration, particularly within the context of solving reasoning-intensive tasks.

Recent LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving exam-like math word problems. However, the degree to which these numerical reasoning skills are effective in real-world scenarios, particularly in expert domains, is still largely unexplored. This paper introduces DocMath-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the numerical reasoning capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing specialized documents containing both text and tables. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 48 LLMs with Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods, aiming to comprehensively assess the capabilities and limitations of existing LLMs in DocMath-Eval. We found that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) still significantly lags behind human experts in solving complex numerical reasoning problems grounded in long contexts. We believe that DocMath-Eval can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in solving challenging numerical reasoning problems within expert domains.

In the era of data-driven decision-making, Long-Form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) is essential for integrating structured data with complex reasoning. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) for LFTQA, evaluating their effectiveness remains a significant challenge. We introduce LFTQA-Eval, a meta-evaluation dataset comprising 2,988 human-annotated examples, to rigorously assess the efficacy of current automated metrics in assessing LLM-based LFTQA systems, with a focus on faithfulness and comprehensiveness. Our findings reveal that existing automatic metrics poorly correlate with human judgments and fail to consistently differentiate between factually accurate responses and those that are coherent but factually incorrect. Additionally, our in-depth examination of the limitations associated with automated evaluation methods provides essential insights for the improvement of LFTQA automated evaluation.

We introduce FinDVer, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing long, hybrid-content financial documents. FinDVer contains 4,000 expert-annotated examples across four subsets, each focusing on a type of scenario that frequently arises in real-world financial domains. We assess a broad spectrum of 25 LLMs under long-context and RAG settings. Our results show that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) significantly lags behind human experts. Our detailed findings and insights highlight the strengths and limitations of existing LLMs in this new task. We believe FinDVer can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLM capabilities in claim verification over complex, expert-domain documents.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding tasks. However, existing benchmarks are inadequate in measuring the complex logical reasoning capabilities of a model. We present FOLIO, a human-annotated, logically complex and diverse dataset for reasoning in natural language (NL), equipped with first-order logic (FOL) annotations. FOLIO consists of 1,430 examples (unique conclusions), each paired with one of 487 sets of premises used to deductively reason for the validity of each conclusion. The logical correctness of the premises and conclusions is ensured by their FOL annotations, which are automatically verified by an FOL inference engine. In addition to the main NL reasoning task, NL-FOL pairs in FOLIO constitute a new NL-FOL translation dataset. Our experiments on FOLIO systematically evaluate the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. For both NL reasoning and NL-FOL translation, we benchmark multiple state-of-the-art language models. Our results show that a subset of FOLIO remains a challenge for one of the most capable Large Language Model (LLM) publicly available, GPT-4.

As long-context large language models (LLMs) are attracting increasing attention for their ability to handle context windows exceeding 128k tokens, the need for effective evaluation methods for these models becomes critical.Existing evaluation methods, however, fall short: needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) and its variants are overly simplistic, while creating realistic benchmarks is prohibitively expensive due to extensive human annotation requirements. To bridge this gap, we propose TAIL, an automatic toolkit for creating realistic evaluation benchmarks and assessing the performance of long-context LLMs.With TAIL, users can customize the building of a long-context, document-grounded QA benchmark and obtain visualized performance metrics of evaluated models.TAIL has the advantage of requiring minimal human annotation and generating natural questions based on user-provided long-context documents. We apply TAIL to construct a benchmark encompassing multiple expert domains, such as finance, law, patent, and scientific literature. We then evaluate four state-of-the-art long-context LLMs using this benchmark. Results show that all LLMs experience varyingdegrees of performance degradation as contextlengths increase.

Table data is pervasive in various industries, and its comprehension and manipulation demand significant time and effort for users seeking to extract relevant information. Consequently, an increasing number of studies have been directed towards table-to-text generation tasks. However, most existing methods are benchmarked solely on a limited number of datasets with varying configurations, leading to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents OpenT2T, the first open-source toolkit for table-to-text generation, designed to reproduce existing large language models (LLMs) for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models.We have implemented and compared a wide range of LLMs under zero- and few-shot settings on 9 table-to-text generation datasets, covering data insight generation, table summarization, and free-form table question answering. Additionally, we maintain a public leaderboard to provide insights for future work into how to choose appropriate table-to-text generation systems for real-world scenarios.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents, proficient in planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks. However, without agent-tuning, open-source models like LLaMA2 currently struggle to match the efficiency of larger models such as GPT-4 in scientific applications due to a lack of agent tuning datasets. In response, we introduce MIMIR, a streamlined platform that leverages large LLMs to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuning smaller, specialized models. By employing a role-playing methodology, MIMIR enables larger models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2. This approach ensures that even smaller models can effectively serve as agents in scientific tasks. Integrating these features into an end-to-end platform, MIMIR facilitates everything from the uploading of scientific data to one-click agent fine-tuning. MIMIR is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github. com/gersteinlab/MIMIR, along with a demo video for quick-start, calling for broader development.

We introduce OMG-QA, a new resource for question answering that is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of question answering systems that perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in scenarios that demand reasoning on multi-modal, multi-document contexts. These systems, given a user query, must retrieve relevant contexts from the web, which may include non-textual information, and then reason and synthesize these contents to generate a detailed, coherent answer. Unlike existing open-domain QA datasets, OMG-QA requires systems to navigate and integrate diverse modalities and a broad pool of information sources, making it uniquely challenging. We conduct a thorough evaluation and analysis of a diverse set of QA systems, featuring various retrieval frameworks, document retrievers, document indexing approaches, evidence retrieval methods, and LLMs tasked with both information retrieval and generation. Our findings reveal significant limitations in existing approaches using RAG or LLM agents to address open questions that require long-form answers supported by multi-modal evidence. We believe that OMG-QA will be a valuable resource for developing QA systems that are better equipped to handle open-domain, multi-modal information-seeking tasks.

While large language models (LLMs) can already achieve strong performance on standard generic summarization benchmarks, their performance on more complex summarization task settings is less studied. Therefore, we benchmark LLMs on instruction controllable text summarization, where the model input consists of both a source article and a natural language requirement for desired summary characteristics. To this end, we curate an evaluation-only dataset for this task setting and conduct human evaluations of five LLM-based systems to assess their instruction-following capabilities in controllable summarization. We then benchmark LLM-based automatic evaluation for this task with 4 different evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs, resulting in 40 evaluation methods. Our study reveals that instruction controllable text summarization remains a challenging task for LLMs, since (1) all LLMs evaluated still make factual and other types of errors in their summaries; (2) no LLM-based evaluation methods can achieve a strong alignment with human annotators when judging the quality of candidate summaries; (3) different LLMs show large performance gaps in summary generation and evaluation capabilities. We make our collected benchmark InstruSum publicly available to facilitate future research in this direction.

This study introduces a new long-form database question answering dataset designed to evaluate how Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with a SQL interpreter. The task necessitates LLMs to strategically generate multiple SQL queries to retrieve sufficient data from a database, to reason with the acquired context, and to synthesize them into a comprehensive analytical narrative. Our findings highlight that this task poses great challenges even for the state-of-the-art **GPT-4** model. We propose and evaluate two interaction strategies, and provide a fine-grained analysis of the individual stages within the interaction. A key discovery is the identification of two primary bottlenecks hindering effective interaction: the capacity for planning and the ability to generate multiple SQL queries. To address the challenge of accurately assessing answer quality, we introduce a multi-agent evaluation framework that simulates the academic peer-review process, enhancing the precision and reliability of our evaluations. This framework allows for a more nuanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in complex retrieval and reasoning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these issues, we propose MedAgents, a novel multi-disciplinary collaboration framework for the medical domain. MedAgents leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting that participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work focuses on the zero-shot setting, which is applicable in real-world scenarios. Experimental results on nine datasets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MedAgents framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedAgents.

Data contamination has garnered increased attention in the era of Large language models (LLMs) due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora. The issue of training corpus overlap with evaluation benchmarks—referred to as contamination—has been the focus of significant recent research. This body of work aims to identify contamination, understand its impacts, and explore mitigation strategies from diverse perspectives. However, comprehensive studies that provide a clear pathway from foundational concepts to advanced insights are lacking in this nascent field. Therefore, we present the first survey in the field of data contamination. We begin by examining the effects of data contamination across various stages and forms. We then provide a detailed analysis of current contamination detection methods, categorizing them to highlight their focus, assumptions, strengths, and limitations. We also discuss mitigation strategies, offering a clear guide for future research. This survey serves as a succinct overview of the most recent advancements in data contamination research, providing a straightforward guide for the benefit of future research endeavors.

Existing evaluation benchmarks for foundation models in understanding scientific literature predominantly focus on single-document, text-only tasks. Such benchmarks often do not adequately represent the complexity of research workflows, which typically also involve interpreting non-textual data, such as figures and tables, and gathering information across multiple documents and related literature. To address this gap, we introduce M3SciQA, a multi-modal, multi-document scientific question answering benchmark designed for a more comprehensive evaluation of foundation models. M3Sci QA consists of 1452 expert-annotated questions spanning 70 natural language processing paper clusters, where each cluster represents a primary paper along with all its cited documents, mirroring the workflow of comprehending a single paper by requiring multi-modal and multi-document data. With M3SciQA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 frontier foundation models. Our results indicate that current foundation models still significantly underperform compared to human experts in multi-modal information retrieval and in reasoning across multiple scientific documents. Additionally, we explore the implications of these findings for the future advancement of applying foundation models in multi-modal scientific literature analysis.

Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales, which are not sufficient for properly assessing model’s capabilities. We present P-FOLIO, a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. P-FOLIO is collected with an annotation protocol that facilitates humans to annotate well-structured natural language proofs for first-order logic reasoning problems in a step-by-step manner. The number of reasoning steps in P-FOLIO span from 0 to 20. We further use P-FOLIO to evaluate and improve large-language-model (LLM) reasoning capabilities. We evaluate LLM reasoning capabilities at a fine granularity via single-step inference rule classification, with more diverse inference rules of more diverse and higher levels of complexities than previous works. Given that a single model-generated reasoning chain could take a completely different path than the human-annotated one, we sample multiple reasoning chains from a model and use pass@k metrics for evaluating the quality of model-generated reasoning chains. We show that human-written reasoning chains significantly boost the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs via many-shot prompting and fine-tuning. Furthermore, fine-tuning Llam3-7B on P-FOLIO improves the model performance by 10% or more on three other out-of-domain logical reasoning datasets.

Recent observations have underscored a disparity between the inflated benchmark scores and the actual performance of LLMs, raising concerns about potential contamination of evaluation benchmarks. This issue is especially critical for closed-source models and certain open-source models where training data transparency is lacking. In this paper we study data contamination by proposing two methods tailored for both open-source and proprietary LLMs. We first introduce a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora. We further present a novel investigation protocol named Testset Slot Guessing (TS-Guessing), applicable to both open and proprietary models. This approach entails masking a wrong answer in a multiple-choice question and prompting the model to fill in the gap. Additionally, it involves obscuring an unlikely word in an evaluation example and asking the model to produce it. We find that certain commercial LLMs could surprisingly guess the missing option in various test sets. Specifically, in the MMLU benchmark, ChatGPT and GPT-4 demonstrated an exact match rate of 52% and 57%, respectively, in guessing the missing options in benchmark test data. We hope these results underscore the need for more robust evaluation methodologies and benchmarks in the field.

Despite the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, producing complex, structured tabular data remains challenging. Our study assesses LLMs’ proficiency in structuring tables and introduces a novel fine-tuning method, cognizant of data structures, to bolster their performance. We unveil Struc-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring prominent LLMs (GPT-NeoX-20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna), which spans text tables, HTML, and LaTeX formats. Our proposed FormatCoT aids in crafting format-specific instructions from the intended outputs to populate this benchmark. Addressing the gap in task-centered evaluation, we propose two innovative metrics, P-Score (Prompting Score) and H-Score (Heuristical Score), to more accurately gauge LLM performance. Our experiments show that applying our structure-aware fine-tuning to LLaMA-7B leads to substantial performance gains, outshining its LLM counterparts across most measures. In-depth error analysis and creating an ability map across six dimensions, coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination, highlight areas for future enhancements and suggest forthcoming research trajectories. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Recently, large language models (LLMs), especially those that are pretrained on code, have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating programs from natural language inputs. Despite promising results, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive evaluation of these models’ language-to-code generation capabilities. Existing studies often focus on specific tasks, model architectures, or learning paradigms, leading to a fragmented understanding of the overall landscape. In this work, we present L2CEval, a systematic evaluation of the language-to-code generation capabilities of LLMs on 7 tasks across the domain spectrum of semantic parsing, math reasoning, and Python programming, analyzing the factors that potentially affect their performance, such as model size, pretraining data, instruction tuning, and different prompting methods. In addition, we assess confidence calibration, and conduct human evaluations to identify typical failures across different tasks and models. L2CEval offers a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in language-to-code generation. We release the evaluation framework1 and all model outputs, hoping to lay the groundwork for further future research. All future evaluations (e.g., LLaMA-3, StarCoder2, etc) will be updated on the project website: https://l2c-eval.github.io/.

Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation studies for summarization either exhibit a low inter-annotator agreement or have insufficient scale, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. Therefore, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: (1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for a high inter-annotator agreement. (2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of 22,000 summary-level annotations over 28 top-performing systems on three datasets. (3) We conduct a comparative study of four human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. (4) We evaluate 50 automatic metrics and their variants using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. The metrics we benchmarked include recent methods based on large language models (LLMs), GPTScore and G-Eval. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating LLMs, as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators’ prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.

Despite significant progress having been made in question answering on tabular data (Table QA), it’s unclear whether, and to what extent existing Table QA models are robust to task-specific perturbations, e.g., replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. To systematically study the robustness of Table QA models, we propose a benchmark called RobuT, which builds upon existing Table QA datasets (WTQ, WikiSQL-Weak, and SQA) and includes human-annotated adversarial perturbations in terms of table header, table content, and question. Our results indicate that both state-of-the-art Table QA models and large language models (e.g., GPT-3) with few-shot learning falter in these adversarial sets. We propose to address this problem by using large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models.

There are a growing number of table pre-training methods proposed for reasoning over tabular data (e.g., question answering, fact checking, and faithful text generation). However, most existing methods are benchmarked solely on a limited number of datasets, varying in configuration, which leads to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents OpenRT, the first open-source framework for reasoning over tabular data, to reproduce existing table pre-training models for performance comparison and develop new models quickly. We implemented and compared six table pre-training models on four question answering, one fact checking, and one faithful text generation datasets. Moreover, to enable the community to easily construct new table reasoning datasets, we developed TaRAT, an annotation tool which supports multi-person collaborative annotations for various kinds of table reasoning tasks. The researchers are able to deploy the newly-constructed dataset to OpenRT and compare the performances of different baseline systems.

Logical Table-to-Text (LT2T) generation is tasked with generating logically faithful sentences from tables. There currently exists two challenges in the field: 1) Faithfulness: how to generate sentences that are factually correct given the table content; 2) Diversity: how to generate multiple sentences that offer different perspectives on the table. This work proposes LoFT, which utilizes logic forms as fact verifiers and content planners to control LT2T generation. Experimental results on the LogicNLG dataset demonstrate that LoFT is the first model that addresses unfaithfulness and lack of diversity issues simultaneously. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/LoFT.

People primarily consult tables to conduct data analysis or answer specific questions. Text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries tailored to users’ information needs can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. Motivated by this, we define a new query-focused table summarization task, where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored summary. We introduce a new benchmark named QTSumm for this task, which contains 7,111 human-annotated query-summary pairs over 2,934 tables covering diverse topics. We investigate a set of strong baselines on QTSumm, including text generation, table-to-text generation, and large language models. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that the new task presents significant challenges in table-to-text generation for future research. Moreover, we propose a new approach named ReFactor, to retrieve and reason over query-relevant information from tabular data to generate several natural language facts. Experimental results demonstrate that ReFactor can bring effective improvements to baselines by concatenating the generated facts to the model input. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/QTSumm.

Interpretability and efficiency are two important considerations for the adoption of neural automatic metrics. In this work, we develop strong-performing automatic metrics for reference-based summarization evaluation, based on a two-stage evaluation pipeline that first extracts basic information units from one text sequence and then checks the extracted units in another sequence. The metrics we developed include two-stage metrics that can provide high interpretability at both the fine-grained unit level and summary level, and one-stage metrics that achieve a balance between efficiency and interpretability. We make the developed tools publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/AutoACU.

Tabular data is prevalent across various industries, necessitating significant time and effort for users to understand and manipulate for their information-seeking purposes. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous potential to improve user efficiency. However, the adoption of LLMs in real-world applications for table information seeking remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. These include the LogicNLG and our newly-constructed LoTNLG datasets for data insight generation, along with the FeTaQA and our newly-constructed F2WTQ datasets for query-based generation. We structure our investigation around three research questions, evaluating the performance of LLMs in table-to-text generation, automated evaluation, and feedback generation, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the current high-performing LLM, specifically GPT-4, can effectively serve as a table-to-text generator, evaluator, and feedback generator, facilitating users’ information seeking purposes in real-world scenarios. However, a significant performance gap still exists between other open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Vicuna and LLaMA-2) and GPT-4 models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-T2T.

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new approach to various natural language processing tasks, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to make predictions based on context that has been supplemented with a few examples or task-specific instructions. In this paper, we aim to extend this method to question answering tasks that utilize structured knowledge sources, and improve Text-to-SQL systems by exploring various prompt design strategies for employing LLMs. We conduct a systematic investigation into different demonstration selection methods and optimal instruction formats for prompting LLMs in the Text-to-SQL task. Our approach involves leveraging the syntactic structure of an example’s SQL query to retrieve demonstrations, and we demonstrate that pursuing both diversity and similarity in demonstration selection leads to enhanced performance. Furthermore, we show that LLMs benefit from database-related knowledge augmentations. Our most effective strategy outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 2.5 points (Execution Accuracy) and the best fine-tuned system by 5.1 points on the Spider dataset. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in adapting LLMs to the Text-to-SQL task, and we present an analysis of the factors contributing to the success of our strategy.

Numerical reasoning over hybrid data containing both textual and tabular content (e.g., financial reports) has recently attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, existing question answering (QA) benchmarks over hybrid data only include a single flat table in each document and thus lack examples of multi-step numerical reasoning across multiple hierarchical tables. To facilitate data analytical progress, we construct a new large-scale benchmark, MultiHiertt, with QA pairs over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual data. MultiHiertt is built from a wealth of financial reports and has the following unique characteristics: 1) each document contain multiple tables and longer unstructured texts; 2) most of tables contained are hierarchical; 3) the reasoning process required for each question is more complex and challenging than existing benchmarks; and 4) fine-grained annotations of reasoning processes and supporting facts are provided to reveal complex numerical reasoning. We further introduce a novel QA model termed MT2Net, which first applies facts retrieving to extract relevant supporting facts from both tables and text and then uses a reasoning module to perform symbolic reasoning over retrieved facts. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various baselines. The experimental results show that MultiHiertt presents a strong challenge for existing baselines whose results lag far behind the performance of human experts. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/MultiHiertt.

Unfaithful text generation is a common problem for text generation systems. In the case of Data-to-Text (D2T) systems, the factuality of the generated text is particularly crucial for any real-world applications. We introduce R2D2, a training framework that addresses unfaithful Data-to-Text generation by training a system both as a generator and a faithfulness discriminator with additional replacement detection and unlikelihood learning tasks. To facilitate such training, we propose two methods for sampling unfaithful sentences. We argue that the poor entity retrieval capability of D2T systems is one of the primary sources of unfaithfulness, so in addition to the existing metrics, we further propose named entity based metrics to evaluate the fidelity of D2T generations. Our experimental results show that R2D2 systems could effectively mitigate the unfaithful text generation, and they achieve new state-of-theart results on FeTaQA, LogicNLG, and ToTTo, all with significant improvements.

Reasoning over tabular data requires both table structure understanding and a broad set of table reasoning skills. Current models with table-specific architectures and pre-training methods perform well on understanding table structures, but they still struggle with tasks that require various table reasoning skills. In this work, we develop ReasTAP to show that high-level table reasoning skills can be injected into models during pre-training without a complex table-specific architecture design. We define 7 table reasoning skills, such as numerical operation, temporal comparison, and conjunction. Each reasoning skill is associated with one example generator, which synthesizes questions over semi-structured tables according to the sampled templates. We model the table pre-training task as a sequence generation task and pre-train ReasTAP to generate precise answers of the synthetic examples. ReasTAP is evaluated on four benchmarks covering three downstream tasks including 1) WikiSQL-Weak and WikiTQ for Table Question Answering, 2) TabFact for Table Fact Verification, and 3) LogicNLG for Faithful Table-to-Text Generation. Experimental results demonstrate that ReasTAP achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them and delivers a significant improvement under low-resource setting. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/ReasTAP.

Answering questions over financial reports containing both tabular and textual data (hybrid data) is challenging as it requires models to select information from financial reports and perform complex quantitative analyses. Although current models have demonstrated a solid capability to solve simple questions, they struggle with complex questions that require a multiple-step numerical reasoning process. This paper proposes a new framework named FinMath, which improves the model’s numerical reasoning capacity by injecting a tree-structured neural model to perform multi-step numerical reasoning. Specifically, FinMath extracts supporting evidence from the financial reports given the question in the first phase. In the second phase, a tree-structured neural model is applied to generate a tree expression in a top-down recursive way. Experiments on the TAT-QA dataset show that our proposed approach improves the previous best result by 8.5% absolute for Exact Match (EM) score (50.1% to 58.6%) and 6.1% absolute for numeracy-focused F1 score (58.0% to 64.1%).