Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains. It requires an accurate understanding of field semantics to correctly operate on table fields and find common patterns in daily analysis. In this paper, we introduce the AnaMeta dataset, a collection of 467k tables with derived supervision labels for four types of commonly used field metadata: measure/dimension dichotomy, common field roles, semantic field type, and default aggregation function. We evaluate a wide range of models for inferring metadata as the benchmark. We also propose a multi-encoder framework, called KDF, which improves the metadata understanding capability of tabular models by incorporating distribution and knowledge information. Furthermore, we propose four interfaces for incorporating field metadata into downstream analysis tasks.

Exploring data is crucial in data analysis, as it helps users understand and interpret the data more effectively. However, performing effective data exploration requires in-depth knowledge of the dataset, the user intent and expertise in data analysis techniques. Not being familiar with either can create obstacles that make the process time-consuming and overwhelming. To address this issue, we introduce InsightPilot, an LLM (Large Language Model)-based, automated data exploration system designed to simplify the data exploration process. InsightPilot features a set of carefully designed analysis actions that streamline the data exploration process. Given a natural language question, InsightPilot collaborates with the LLM to issue a sequence of analysis actions, explore the data and generate insights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of InsightPilot in a user study and a case study, showing how it can help users gain valuable insights from their datasets.

Large Language Model (LLM) has gained popularity and achieved remarkable results in open-domain tasks, but its performance in real industrial domain-specific scenarios is average due to its lack of specific domain knowledge. This issue has attracted widespread attention, but there are few relevant benchmarks available. In this paper, we provide a benchmark Question Answering (QA) dataset named MSQA, centered around Microsoft products and IT technical problems encountered by customers. This dataset contains industry cloud-specific QA knowledge, an area not extensively covered in general LLMs, making it well-suited for evaluating methods aiming to enhance LLMs’ domain-specific capabilities. In addition, we propose a new model interaction paradigm that can empower LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach following our method outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods. We make our source code and sample data available at: https://aka.ms/Microsoft_QA.

We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse trees. HermEs improves the formula prediction accuracy by (1) guaranteeing correct grammar by hierarchical generation rather than left-to-right generation and (2) significantly streamlining the token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. Notably, instead of generating formulas in a pre-defined fixed order, we propose a novel sampling strategy to systematically exploit a variety of hierarchical and multi-level expansion orders and provided solid mathematical proof, with the aim of meeting diverse human needs of the formula writing order in real applications. We further develop an interactive formula completion interface based on HermEs, which shows a new user experience in https://github.com/formulet/HERMES.

Compositional generalization–understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives–is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning–the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models–exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.

Tables are often created with hierarchies, but existing works on table reasoning mainly focus on flat tables and neglect hierarchical tables. Hierarchical tables challenge numerical reasoning by complex hierarchical indexing, as well as implicit relationships of calculation and semantics. We present a new dataset, HiTab, to study question answering (QA) and natural language generation (NLG) over hierarchical tables. HiTab is a cross-domain dataset constructed from a wealth of statistical reports and Wikipedia pages, and has unique characteristics: (1) nearly all tables are hierarchical, and (2) QA pairs are not proposed by annotators from scratch, but are revised from real and meaningful sentences authored by analysts. (3) to reveal complex numerical reasoning in statistical reports, we provide fine-grained annotations of quantity and entity alignment. Experiments suggest that this HiTab presents a strong challenge for existing baselines and a valuable benchmark for future research. Targeting hierarchical structure, we devise a hierarchy-aware logical form for symbolic reasoning over tables, which shows high effectiveness. Targeting table reasoning, we leverage entity and quantity alignment to explore partially supervised training in QA and conditional generation in NLG, and largely reduce spurious predictions in QA and produce better descriptions in NLG.

Tables store rich numerical data, but numerical reasoning over tables is still a challenge. In this paper, we find that the spreadsheet formula, a commonly used language to perform computations on numerical values in spreadsheets, is a valuable supervision for numerical reasoning in tables. Considering large amounts of spreadsheets available on the web, we propose FORTAP, the first exploration to leverage spreadsheet formulas for table pretraining. Two novel self-supervised pretraining objectives are derived from formulas, numerical reference prediction (NRP) and numerical calculation prediction (NCP). While our proposed objectives are generic for encoders, to better capture spreadsheet table layouts and structures, FORTAP is built upon TUTA, the first transformer-based method for spreadsheet table pretraining with tree attention. FORTAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins on three representative datasets of formula prediction, question answering, and cell type classification, showing the great potential of leveraging formulas for table pretraining.

Code search is to search reusable code snippets from source code corpus based on natural languages queries. Deep learning-based methods on code search have shown promising results. However, previous methods focus on retrieval accuracy, but lacked attention to the efficiency of the retrieval process. We propose a novel method CoSHC to accelerate code search with deep hashing and code classification, aiming to perform efficient code search without sacrificing too much accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of CoSHC, we apply our methodon five code search models. Extensive experimental results indicate that compared with previous code search baselines, CoSHC can save more than 90% of retrieval time meanwhile preserving at least 99% of retrieval accuracy.

Existing auto-regressive pre-trained language models (PLMs) like T5 and BART, have been well applied to table question answering by UNIFIEDSKG and TAPEX, respectively, and demonstrated state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks. However, auto-regressive PLMs are challenged by recent emerging numerical reasoning datasets, such as TAT-QA, due to the error-prone implicit calculation. In this paper, we present TaCube, to pre-compute aggregation/arithmetic results for the table in advance, so that they are handy and readily available for PLMs to answer numerical reasoning questions. TaCube systematically and comprehensively covers a collection of computational operations over table segments. By simply concatenating TaCube to the input sequence of PLMs, it shows significant experimental effectiveness. TaCube promotes the F1 score from 49.6% to 66.2% on TAT-QA and achieves new state-of-the-art results on WikiTQ (59.6% denotation accuracy). TaCube’s improvements on numerical reasoning cases are even more notable: on TAT-QA, TaCube promotes the exact match accuracy of BART-large by 39.6% on sum, 52.5% on average, 36.6% on substraction, and 22.2% on division. We believe that TaCube is a general and portable pre-computation solution that can be potentially integrated to various numerical reasoning frameworks

Commit messages are important for software development and maintenance. Many neural network-based approaches have been proposed and shown promising results on automatic commit message generation. However, the generated commit messages could be repetitive or redundant. In this paper, we propose RACE, a new retrieval-augmented neural commit message generation method, which treats the retrieved similar commit as an exemplar and leverages it to generate an accurate commit message. As the retrieved commit message may not always accurately describe the content/intent of the current code diff, we also propose an exemplar guider, which learns the semantic similarity between the retrieved and current code diff and then guides the generation of commit message based on the similarity. We conduct extensive experiments on a large public dataset with five programming languages. Experimental results show that RACE can outperform all baselines. Furthermore, RACE can boost the performance of existing Seq2Seq models in commit message generation.

Logical table-to-text generation is a task that involves generating logically faithful sentences from tables, which requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. It raises a new challenge on the logical-level content planning of table-to-text models. However, directly learning the logical inference knowledge from table-text pairs is very difficult for neural models because of the ambiguity of natural language and the scarcity of parallel data. Hence even large-scale pre-trained language models present low logical fidelity on logical table-to-text. In this work, we propose a Pretrained Logical Form Generator (PLOG) framework to improve generation fidelity. Specifically, PLOG is first pretrained on a table-to-logical-form generation (table-to-logic) task, then finetuned on downstream table-to-text tasks. The logical forms are formally defined with unambiguous semantics. Hence we can collect a large amount of accurate logical forms from tables without human annotation. In addition, PLOG can learn logical inference from table-logic pairs much more reliably than from table-text pairs. To evaluate our model, we further collect a controlled logical table-to-text dataset CONTLOG based on an existing dataset. On two benchmarks, LOGICNLG and CONTLOG, PLOG outperforms strong baselines by a large margin on the logical fidelity, demonstrating the effectiveness of table-to-logic pretraining.

Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to conduct numerical capability diagnosis on a series of Numerical Question Answering systems and datasets. A series of numerical capabilities are highlighted, and corresponding dataset perturbations are designed. Empirical results indicate that existing systems are severely challenged by these perturbations. E.g., Graph2Tree experienced a 53.83% absolute accuracy drop against the “Extra” perturbation on ASDiv-a, and BART experienced 13.80% accuracy drop against the “Language” perturbation on the numerical subset of DROP. As a counteracting approach, we also investigate the effectiveness of applying perturbations as data augmentation to relieve systems’ lack of robust numerical capabilities. With experiment analysis and empirical studies, it is demonstrated that Numerical Question Answering with robust numerical capabilities is still to a large extent an open question. We discuss future directions of Numerical Question Answering and summarize guidelines on future dataset collection and system design.

Online forms are widely used to collect data from human and have a multi-billion market. Many software products provide online services for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by predefined structures. However, the design and creation process of forms is still tedious and requires expert knowledge. To assist form designers, in this work we present FormLM to model online forms (by enhancing pre-trained language model with form structural information) and recommend form creation ideas (including question / options recommendations and block type suggestion). For model training and evaluation, we collect the first public online form dataset with 62K online forms. Experiment results show that FormLM significantly outperforms general-purpose language models on all tasks, with an improvement by 4.71 on Question Recommendation and 10.6 on Block Type Suggestion in terms of ROUGE-1 and Macro-F1, respectively.

Weakly supervised semantic parsing (WSP) aims at training a parser via utterance-denotation pairs. This task is challenging because it requires (1) searching consistent logical forms in a huge space; and (2) dealing with spurious logical forms. In this work, we propose Learning from Mistakes (LFM), a simple yet effective learning framework for WSP. LFM utilizes the mistakes made by a parser during searching, i.e., generating logical forms that do not execute to correct denotations, for tackling the two challenges. In a nutshell, LFM additionally trains a parser using utterance-logical form pairs created from mistakes, which can quickly bootstrap the parser to search consistent logical forms. Also, it can motivate the parser to learn the correct mapping between utterances and logical forms, thus dealing with the spuriousness of logical forms. We evaluate LFM on WikiTableQuestions, WikiSQL, and TabFact in the WSP setting. The parser trained with LFM outperforms the previous state-of-the-art semantic parsing approaches on the three datasets. Also, we find that LFM can substantially reduce the need for labeled data. Using only 10% of utterance-denotation pairs, the parser achieves 84.2 denotation accuracy on WikiSQL, which is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art approaches using 100% labeled data.

Code summarization aims to generate concise natural language descriptions of source code, which can help improve program comprehension and maintenance. Recent studies show that syntactic and structural information extracted from abstract syntax trees (ASTs) is conducive to summary generation. However, existing approaches fail to fully capture the rich information in ASTs because of the large size/depth of ASTs. In this paper, we propose a novel model CAST that hierarchically splits and reconstructs ASTs. First, we hierarchically split a large AST into a set of subtrees and utilize a recursive neural network to encode the subtrees. Then, we aggregate the embeddings of subtrees by reconstructing the split ASTs to get the representation of the complete AST. Finally, AST representation, together with source code embedding obtained by a vanilla code token encoder, is used for code summarization. Extensive experiments, including the ablation study and the human evaluation, on benchmarks have demonstrated the power of CAST. To facilitate reproducibility, our code and data are available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/CAST.

Recent years the task of incomplete utterance rewriting has raised a large attention. Previous works usually shape it as a machine translation task and employ sequence to sequence based architecture with copy mechanism. In this paper, we present a novel and extensive approach, which formulates it as a semantic segmentation task. Instead of generating from scratch, such a formulation introduces edit operations and shapes the problem as prediction of a word-level edit matrix. Benefiting from being able to capture both local and global information, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets. Furthermore, our approach is four times faster than the standard approach in inference.

In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, the text-to-SQL technique allows users to query databases by using natural language questions. Though significant progress in this area has been made recently, most parsers may fall short when they are deployed in real systems. One main reason stems from the difficulty of fully understanding the users’ natural language questions. In this paper, we include human in the loop and present a novel parser-independent interactive approach (PIIA) that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. Experiments were conducted on two cross-domain datasets, the WikiSQL and the more complex Spider, with five state-of-the-art parsers. These demonstrated that PIIA is capable of enhancing the text-to-SQL performance with limited interaction turns by using both simulation and human evaluation.

Despite the continuing efforts to improve the engagingness and consistency of chit-chat dialogue systems, the majority of current work simply focus on mimicking human-like responses, leaving understudied the aspects of modeling understanding between interlocutors. The research in cognitive science, instead, suggests that understanding is an essential signal for a high-quality chit-chat conversation. Motivated by this, we propose Pˆ2 Bot, a transmitter-receiver based framework with the aim of explicitly modeling understanding. Specifically, Pˆ2 Bot incorporates mutual persona perception to enhance the quality of personalized dialogue generation. Experiments on a large public dataset, Persona-Chat, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a considerable boost over the state-of-the-art baselines across both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

We present a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. IRNet aims to address two challenges: 1) the mismatch between intents expressed in natural language (NL) and the implementation details in SQL; 2) the challenge in predicting columns caused by the large number of out-of-domain words. Instead of end-to-end synthesizing a SQL query, IRNet decomposes the synthesis process into three phases. In the first phase, IRNet performs a schema linking over a question and a database schema. Then, IRNet adopts a grammar-based neural model to synthesize a SemQL query which is an intermediate representation that we design to bridge NL and SQL. Finally, IRNet deterministically infers a SQL query from the synthesized SemQL query with domain knowledge. On the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider, IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy, obtaining 19.5% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. At the time of writing, IRNet achieves the first position on the Spider leaderboard.

Context-dependent semantic parsing has proven to be an important yet challenging task. To leverage the advances in context-independent semantic parsing, we propose to perform follow-up query analysis, aiming to restate context-dependent natural language queries with contextual information. To accomplish the task, we propose STAR, a novel approach with a well-designed two-phase process. It is parser-independent and able to handle multifarious follow-up scenarios in different domains. Experiments on the FollowUp dataset show that STAR outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by a large margin of nearly 8%. The superiority on parsing results verifies the feasibility of follow-up query analysis. We also explore the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset, which is very promising.

On text-to-SQL generation, the input utterance usually contains lots of tokens that are related to column names or cells in the table, called table-related tokens. These table-related tokens are troublesome for the downstream neural semantic parser because it brings complex semantics and hinders the sharing across the training examples. However, existing approaches either ignore handling these tokens before the semantic parser or simply use deterministic approaches based on string-match or word embedding similarity. In this work, we propose a more efficient approach to handle table-related tokens before the semantic parser. First, we formulate it as a sequential tagging problem and propose a two-stage anonymization model to learn the semantic relationship between tables and input utterances. Then, we leverage the implicit supervision from SQL queries by policy gradient to guide the training. Experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently improves performances of different neural semantic parsers and significantly outperforms deterministic approaches.

Recent research proposes syntax-based approaches to address the problem of generating programs from natural language specifications. These approaches typically train a sequence-to-sequence learning model using a syntax-based objective: maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Such syntax-based approaches do not effectively address the goal of generating semantically correct programs, because these approaches fail to handle Program Aliasing, i.e., semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a semantics-based approach named SemRegex. SemRegex provides solutions for a subtask of the program-synthesis problem: generating regular expressions from natural language. Different from the existing syntax-based approaches, SemRegex trains the model by maximizing the expected semantic correctness of the generated regular expressions. The semantic correctness is measured using the DFA-equivalence oracle, random test cases, and distinguishing test cases. The experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SemRegex over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.