Papers › TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data

TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data

17 May 2020ACL 2020 6arXiv:2005.08314archive 2025-07-28

Pengcheng Yin, Graham Neubig, Wen-tau Yih, Sebastian Riedel

Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of pretrained language models (LMs) for text-based natural language (NL) understanding tasks. Such models are typically trained on free-form NL text, hence may not be suitable for tasks like semantic parsing over structured data, which require reasoning over both free-form NL questions and structured tabular data (e.g., database tables). In this paper we present TaBERT, a pretrained LM that jointly learns representations for NL sentences and (semi-)structured tables. TaBERT is trained on a large corpus of 26 million tables and their English contexts. In experiments, neural semantic parsers using TaBERT as feature representation layers achieve new best results on the challenging weakly-supervised semantic parsing benchmark WikiTableQuestions, while performing competitively on the text-to-SQL dataset Spider. Implementation of the model will be available at http://fburl.com/TaBERT .

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Code

facebookresearch/tabert officialmentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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Tasks

FormSemantic ParsingText to SQLText-To-SQL

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Parsing WikiTableQuestions MAPO + TABERTLarge (K = 3) Accuracy (Dev) 52.2 #18 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Parsing WikiTableQuestions MAPO + TABERTLarge (K = 3) Accuracy (Test) 51.8 #18 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL spider MAPO + TABERTLarge (K = 3) Exact Match Accuracy (Dev) 64.5 #20 of 20 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: TaBERT

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutGradient ClippingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTaBERTWeight DecayWordPiece

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