Papers › Table Search Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model

Table Search Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model

19 May 2020arXiv:2005.09207archive 2025-07-28

Zhiyu Chen, Mohamed Trabelsi, Jeff Heflin, Yinan Xu, Brian D. Davison

Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks. Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora, pretrained models can capture complex syntactic word relations. In this paper, we use the deep contextualized language model BERT for the task of ad hoc table retrieval. We investigate how to encode table content considering the table structure and input length limit of BERT. We also propose an approach that incorporates features from prior literature on table retrieval and jointly trains them with BERT. In experiments on public datasets, we show that our best approach can outperform the previous state-of-the-art method and BERT baselines with a large margin under different evaluation metrics.

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Zhiyu-Chen/SIGIR2020-BERT-Table-Search mentioned in paperpytorchnot reachable when probed 2026-09-17 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report

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Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingRetrievalTable RetrievalTable Search

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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