arXiVeri: Automatic table verification with GPT
Gyungin Shin Weidi Xie Samuel Albanie
Without accurate transcription of numerical data in scientific documents, a
scientist cannot draw accurate conclusions. Unfortunately, the process of
copying numerical data from one paper to another is prone to human error. In
this paper, we propose to meet this challenge through the novel task of
automatic table verification (AutoTV), in which the objective is to verify the
accuracy of numerical data in tables by cross-referencing cited sources. To
support this task, we propose a new benchmark, arXiVeri, which comprises
tabular data drawn from open-access academic papers on arXiv. We introduce
metrics to evaluate the performance of a table verifier in two key areas: (i)
table matching, which aims to identify the source table in a cited document
that corresponds to a target table, and (ii) cell matching, which aims to
locate shared cells between a target and source table and identify their row
and column indices accurately. By leveraging the flexible capabilities of
modern large language models (LLMs), we propose simple baselines for table
verification. Our findings highlight the complexity of this task, even for
state-of-the-art LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4. The code and benchmark will be made
publicly available.