Tucker Balch


2023

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HiddenTables and PyQTax: A Cooperative Game and Dataset For TableQA to Ensure Scale and Data Privacy Across a Myriad of Taxonomies
William Watson | Nicole Cho | Tucker Balch | Manuela Veloso
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-35-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed “HiddenTables” as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, “HiddenTables” is played between the code-generating LLM “Solver” and the “Oracle” which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve TableQA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM’s collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of “HiddenTables” to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset “PyQTax” that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns and labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs’ deficiency in TableQA tasks, “HiddenTables” is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.

2021

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ViziTex: Interactive Visual Sense-Making of Text Corpora
Natraj Raman | Sameena Shah | Tucker Balch | Manuela Veloso
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop: Language Advances

Information visualization is critical to analytical reasoning and knowledge discovery. We present an interactive studio that integrates perceptive visualization techniques with powerful text analytics algorithms to assist humans in sense-making of large complex text corpora. The novel visual representations introduced here encode the features delivered by modern text mining models using advanced metaphors such as hypergraphs, nested topologies and tessellated planes. They enhance human-computer interaction experience for various tasks such as summarization, exploration, organization and labeling of documents. We demonstrate the ability of the visuals to surface the structure, relations and concepts from documents across different domains.