Exploring the Impact of Table-to-Text Methods on Augmenting LLM-based Question Answering with Domain Hybrid Data
Dehai Min, Nan Hu, Rihui Jin, Nuo Lin, Jiaoyan Chen, Yongrui Chen, Yu Li, Guilin Qi, Yun Li, Nijun Li, Qianren Wang
Abstract
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) with domain specific data has attracted wide attention. However, domain data often exists in a hybrid format, including text and semi-structured tables, posing challenges for the seamless integration of information. Table-to-Text Generation is a promising solution by facilitating the transformation of hybrid data into a uniformly text-formatted corpus. Although this technique has been widely studied by the NLP community, there is currently no comparative analysis on how corpora generated by different table-to-text methods affect the performance of QA systems.In this paper, we address this research gap in two steps. First, we innovatively integrate table-to-text generation into the framework of enhancing LLM-based QA systems with domain hybrid data. Then, we utilize this framework in real-world industrial data to conduct extensive experiments on two types of QA systems (DSFT and RAG frameworks) with four representative methods: Markdown format, Template serialization, TPLM-based method, and LLM-based method. Based on the experimental results, we draw some empirical findings and explore the underlying reasons behind the success of some methods. We hope the findings of this work will provide a valuable reference for the academic and industrial communities in developing robust QA systems.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.naacl-industry.41
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Yi Yang, Aida Davani, Avi Sil, Anoop Kumar
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 464–482
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-industry.41
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Dehai Min, Nan Hu, Rihui Jin, Nuo Lin, Jiaoyan Chen, Yongrui Chen, Yu Li, Guilin Qi, Yun Li, Nijun Li, and Qianren Wang. 2024. Exploring the Impact of Table-to-Text Methods on Augmenting LLM-based Question Answering with Domain Hybrid Data. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 464–482, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Exploring the Impact of Table-to-Text Methods on Augmenting LLM-based Question Answering with Domain Hybrid Data (Min et al., NAACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/jeptaln-2024-ingestion/2024.naacl-industry.41.pdf