{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/large-language-models-are-effective-table-to","title":"Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of LLMs in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios","arxiv_id":"2305.14987","date":"2023-05-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yilun Zhao","Haowei Zhang","Shengyun Si","Linyong Nan","Xiangru Tang","Arman Cohan"],"abstract":"Tabular data is prevalent across various industries, necessitating significant time and effort for users to understand and manipulate for their information-seeking purposes. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous potential to improve user efficiency. However, the adoption of LLMs in real-world applications for table information seeking remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. These include the LogicNLG and our newly-constructed LoTNLG datasets for data insight generation, along with the FeTaQA and our newly-constructed F2WTQ datasets for query-based generation. We structure our investigation around three research questions, evaluating the performance of LLMs in table-to-text generation, automated evaluation, and feedback generation, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the current high-performing LLM, specifically GPT-4, can effectively serve as a table-to-text generator, evaluator, and feedback generator, facilitating users' information seeking purposes in real-world scenarios. However, a significant performance gap still exists between other open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Tulu and LLaMA-2) and GPT-4 models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-T2T.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14987v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.14987v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"large-language-models-are-effective-table-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/yale-nlp/llm-t2t","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"large-language-models-are-effective-table-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/yilunzhao/llm-t2t","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"table-to-text-generation","task_name":"Table-to-Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-4","method_name":"GPT-4"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2305.14987","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.14987","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}