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


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.199
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
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Findings | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
3859–3881
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.199/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuanliang Zhang, Dingzirui Wang, Baoxin Wang, Longxu Dou, Xinyuan Lu, Keyan Xu, Dayong Wu, and Qingfu Zhu. 2025. SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 3859–3881, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.199.pdf