Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval
Peter Baile Chen Yi Zhang Dan Roth
Retrieving relevant tables containing the necessary information to accurately
answer a given question over tables is critical to open-domain
question-answering (QA) systems. Previous methods assume the answer to such a
question can be found either in a single table or multiple tables identified
through question decomposition or rewriting. However, neither of these
approaches is sufficient, as many questions require retrieving multiple tables
and joining them through a join plan that cannot be discerned from the user
query itself. If the join plan is not considered in the retrieval stage, the
subsequent steps of reasoning and answering based on those retrieved tables are
likely to be incorrect. To address this problem, we introduce a method that
uncovers useful join relations for any query and database during table
retrieval. We use a novel re-ranking method formulated as a mixed-integer
program that considers not only table-query relevance but also table-table
relevance that requires inferring join relationships. Our method outperforms
the state-of-the-art approaches for table retrieval by up to 9.3% in F1 score
and for end-to-end QA by up to 5.4% in accuracy.