Keyan Xu


2025

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Abacus-SQL: A Text-to-SQL System Empowering Cross-Domain and Open-Domain Database Retrieval
Keyan Xu | Dingzirui Wang | Xuanliang Zhang | Qingfu Zhu | Wanxiang Che
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

The existing text-to-SQL systems have made significant progress in SQL query generation, but they still face numerous challenges. Existing systems often lack retrieval capabilities for open-domain databases, requiring users to manually filter relevant databases. Additionally, their cross-domain transferability is limited, making it challenging to accommodate diverse query requirements. To address these issues, we propose Abacus-SQL. Abacus-SQL utilizes database retrieval technology to accurately locate the required databases in an open-domain database environment. It also enhances the system cross-domain transfer ability through data augmentation methods. Moreover, Abacus-SQL employs Pre-SQL and Self-debug methods, thereby enhancing the accuracy of SQL queries. Experimental results demonstrate that Abacus-SQL performs excellently in multi-turn text-to-SQL tasks, effectively validating the approach’s effectiveness.Abacus-SQL is publicly accessible at https://huozi.8wss.com/abacus-sql/.

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RoT: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Iterative Row-Wise Traversals
Xuanliang Zhang | Dingzirui Wang | Keyan Xu | Qingfu Zhu | Wanxiang Che
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The table reasoning task, crucial for efficient data acquisition, aims to answer questions based on the given table. Recently, reasoning large language models (RLLMs) with Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) significantly enhance reasoning capabilities, leading to brilliant performance on table reasoning. However, Long CoT suffers from high cost for training and exhibits low reliability due to table content hallucinations. Therefore, we propose Row-of-Thought (RoT), which performs iteratively row-wise table traversal, allowing for reasoning extension and reflection-based refinement at each traversal. Scaling reasoning length by row-wise traversal and leveraging reflection capabilities of LLMs, RoT is training-free. The sequential traversal encourages greater attention to the table, thus reducing hallucinations. Experiments show that RoT, using non-reasoning models, outperforms RLLMs by an average of 4.3%, and achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TableBench with comparable models, proving its effectiveness. Also, RoT outperforms Long CoT with fewer reasoning tokens, indicating higher efficiency.

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SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types
Xuanliang Zhang | Dingzirui Wang | Baoxin Wang | Longxu Dou | Xinyuan Lu | Keyan Xu | Dayong Wu | Qingfu Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SCITAT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To reason on both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SCITAT, we propose a baseline (CAR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CAR brings average improvements of 4.1% over other baselines on SCITAT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SCITAT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.