Semi-structured tables, with their varied layouts and formatting artifacts, remain a major obstacle for automated data processing and analytics. To address these challenges, we propose RelationalCoder, which uniformly converts semi-structured tables into relational data, enabling smooth integration with the rich ecosystem of data processing and analytics tools. By leveraging SQL code, RelationalCoder prevents schema errors and markedly improves normalization quality across multiple relational tables.To address the challenge of large tables, we propose a new technique called Loop Reference Decoding (LRD): it identifies expandable groups—repeating regions of similar structure and semantics—and replicates each group using a concise loop over its repetitive region by referencing cell addresses, rather than regenerating each individual cell. This design substantially reduces output length from 𝒪(N × M)—proportional to the table’s height (N) and width (M)—to approximately 𝒪(K), where K is the total number of unique cell types within detected expandable groups. As a result, LRD is highly scalable: the larger the input table, the greater the compression ratio. It scales seamlessly to extremely large tables, achieving output reductions of up to 100,000×.We further create the first human-labeled corpus for table transformation, created with a cost-efficient, actively supervised pipeline. Extensive experiments on HiTab and MultiHiertt show that RelationalCoder not only enables programmatic symbolic reasoning but also boosts QA accuracy—raising Llama-2 and Mistral models by more than 20%, and GPT-4o by over 4%. Project page: https://github.com/haoyudong/RelationalCoder.

This paper introduces a task aimed at extracting structured tables from text using natural language (NL) instructions. We present TableCoder, an approach that leverages the symbolic nature of code to enhance the robustness of table structure construction and content extraction. TableCoder first generates Python classes or SQL statements to explicitly construct table structures, capturing semantic ontology, computational dependencies, numerical properties, and format strings. This approach reliably mitigates issues such as structural errors, erroneous computations, and mismatched value types. Subsequently, TableCoder proposes grounded content extraction, populating table cells sequentially and maintaining the exact order in which they are mentioned in the source text. By simulating a grounded “translation” from text to code, this method reduces the likelihood of omissions and hallucinations.Experimental results demonstrate that TableCoder significantly improves F1 scores and mitigates hallucination and computational errors, crucial for high-stakes applications like government data analytics and financial compliance reporting. Moreover, the code-generation-based method naturally integrates with standard SQL databases and Python workflows, ensuring seamless deployment in existing enterprise data pipelines.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Most recent efforts adopt pre-trained model to classify the sentences with aspects. However, the aspect sentiment bias from pre-trained model brings some noise to the ABSA task. Besides, traditional methods using cross-entropy loss are hard to find the potential associations between sentiment polarities. In this work, we analyze the ABSA task from a novel cognition perspective: humans can often judge the sentiment of an aspect even if they do not know what the aspect is. Moreover, it is easier to distinguish positive and negative sentiments than others for human beings because positive and negative are two opposite sentiments. To this end, we propose a no-aspect differential sentiment (NADS) framework for the ABSA task. We first design a no-aspect template by replacing the aspect with a special unbiased character to eliminate the sentiment bias and obtain a stronger representation. To better get the benefits from the template, we adopt contrastive learning between the no-aspect template and the original sentence. Then we propose a differential sentiment loss instead of the cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments by distinguishing the different distances between sentiments. Our proposed model is a general framework and can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. Experiments on SemEval 2014 show that our framework is still able to predict the sentiment of the aspect even we don’t konw what the aspect is. Moreover, our NADS framework boosts three typical ABSA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

We propose a method called reverse mapping bytepair encoding, which maps named-entity information and other word-level linguistic features back to subwords during the encoding procedure of bytepair encoding (BPE). We employ this method to the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (OpenAI GPT) by adding a weighted linear layer after the embedding layer. We also propose a new model architecture named as the multi-channel separate transformer to employ a training process without parameter-sharing. Evaluation on Stories Cloze, RTE, SciTail and SST-2 datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.