Logical Table-to-Text Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Reasoning

Lena Trigg, Dean F. Hougen


Abstract
Logical Table-to-Text (LT2T) generation requires models to both verbalize tabular data and reason over it - performing comparisons, aggregations, and causal inference. While many generation tasks struggle with similar analytical demands, LT2T provides a structured perspective on reasoning capabilities in natural language generation. This survey uses LT2T as a lens to focus on reasoning in data-to-text tasks. By focusing narrowly on LT2T, we present a deep taxonomy of methods that inject, structure, or verify reasoning steps, allowing a level of technical granularity missing in broader surveys. We review representative models and evaluation metrics, and highlight how LT2T techniques transfer to general generation challenges involving logic, numeracy, and faithfulness. Our goal is to distill lessons from LT2T that apply more widely, while also guiding future research in table-based reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.103
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
1663–1677
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.103/
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Cite (ACL):
Lena Trigg and Dean F. Hougen. 2025. Logical Table-to-Text Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1663–1677, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Logical Table-to-Text Generation: Challenges, Methods, and Reasoning (Trigg & Hougen, Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.103.pdf