用表格片段生成问题,提升表格检索准确率
Improving Table Retrieval with Question Generation from Partial Tables
- 用大模型根据表格片段生成用户可能提出的问题
- 联合嵌入问题与片段,使表征更贴近真实查询
- 无需全表嵌入,对多种检索器均有效
开放域表格问答中广泛采用基于大语言模型(LLM)的检索-阅读架构。先前工作主要优化阅读器组件,如文本到文本、文本到SQL及多跳推理;而检索器则聚焦于问题表示,或从问题中提取关键词匹配表段。但对如何更好地在嵌入空间表示表格本身关注不足。为此,我们提出QGpT(从部分表格生成问题),利用大模型基于表格小片段生成模拟用户提问的合成问题。这些生成的问题与生成所用的片段共同嵌入,增强与用户查询的语义对齐。该方法无需嵌入整张表格,在多个基准测试中显著提升密集检索和后期交互式检索器的性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent advances in open-domain question answering over tables have widely adopted large language models (LLMs) under the Retriever-Reader architecture. Prior works have effectively leveraged LLMs to tackle the complex reasoning demands of the Reader component, such as text-to-text, text-to-SQL, and multi hop reasoning. In contrast, the Retriever component has primarily focused on optimizing the query representation-training retrievers to retrieve relevant tables based on questions, or to select keywords from questions for matching table segments. However, little attention has been given to enhancing how tables themselves are represented in embedding space to better align with questions. To address this, we propose QGpT (Question Generation from Partial Tables), a simple yet effective method that uses an LLM to generate synthetic questions based on small portions of a table. These questions are generated to simulate how a user might query the content of the table currently under consideration. The generated questions are then jointly embedded with the partial table segments used for generation, enhancing semantic alignment with user queries. Without the need to embed entire tables, our method significantly improves retrieval performance across multiple benchmarks for both dense and late-interaction retrievers.
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