Xuezhi Cao


2020

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Table Fact Verification with Structure-Aware Transformer
Hongzhi Zhang | Yingyao Wang | Sirui Wang | Xuezhi Cao | Fuzheng Zhang | Zhongyuan Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Verifying fact on semi-structured evidence like tables requires the ability to encode structural information and perform symbolic reasoning. Pre-trained language models trained on natural language could not be directly applied to encode tables, because simply linearizing tables into sequences will lose the cell alignment information. To better utilize pre-trained transformers for table representation, we propose a Structure-Aware Transformer (SAT), which injects the table structural information into the mask of the self-attention layer. A method to combine symbolic and linguistic reasoning is also explored for this task. Our method outperforms baseline with 4.93% on TabFact, a large scale table verification dataset.