Natural language understanding over tabular data has played a significant role in data discovery tasks such as joinable and unionable table search. State-of-the-art approaches adopt large language models (LLMs) pre-trained over massive text corpora to learn and evaluate the table semantic relatedness. Existing methods typically follow a pretrain-and-finetune paradigm, namely fine-tuning an LLM using tabular data with table relatedness labels. To enhance model’s understanding of tabular data, recent studies include auxiliary tasks such as entity resolution and column type classification in the fine-tuning phase. In spite of achieving performance gain from these supervisions, there is a lack of study on how these supervisions complement or even contrast each other, leading to a subpar performance on the final data discovery tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective multi-task fine-tuning framework named DiscoverGPT that holistically discovers and leverages the intricate relationships among the supervisions to optimize the performance on the data discovery task. Moreover, DiscoverGPT is plug-and-play that allows a broad range of open-domain auxiliary tasks to be incorporated, by utilizing the generative power of LLMs. We demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of DiscoverGPT with baseline comparisons and ablation studies. DiscoverGPT outperforms the best performing baseline by up to 7% in F1 score.

In-context learning (ICL) adapts Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks, without requiring any parameter updates, but few annotated examples as input. In this work, we investigate selective annotation for ICL, where there is a limited budget for annotating examples, similar to low-budget active learning (AL). Although uncertainty-based selection is unreliable with few annotated data, we present CoverICL, an adaptive graph-based selection algorithm, that effectively incorporates uncertainty sampling into selective annotation for ICL. First, CoverICL builds a nearest-neighbor graph based on the semantic similarity between candidate ICL examples. Then, CoverICL employs uncertainty estimation by the LLM to identify hard examples for the task. Selective annotation is performed over the active graph of the hard examples, adapting the process to the particular LLM used and the task tackled. CoverICL selects the most representative examples by solving a Maximum Coverage problem, approximating diversity-based sampling. Extensive experiments on ten datasets and seven LLMs show that, by incorporating uncertainty via coverage on the active graph, CoverICL (1) outperforms existing AL methods for ICL by 2–4.6% accuracy points, (2) is up to 2x more budget-efficient than SOTA methods for low-budget AL, and (3) generalizes better across tasks compared to non-graph alternatives.

Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized many sectors, including the database industry. One common challenge when dealing with large volumes of tabular data is the pervasive use of abbreviated column names, which can negatively impact performance on various data search, access, and understanding tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a new task, called NameGuess, to expand column names (used in database schema) as a natural language generation problem. We create a training dataset of 384K abbreviated-expanded column pairs using a new data fabrication method and a human-annotated evaluation benchmark that includes 9.2K examples from real-world tables. To tackle the complexities associated with polysemy and ambiguity in NameGuess, we enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on table content and column header names – yielding a fine-tuned model (with 2.7B parameters) that matches human performance. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis (on multiple LLMs) to validate the effectiveness of table content in NameGuess and identify promising future opportunities. Code has been made available at https://github.com/amazon-science/nameguess.