Benchmarking Table Comprehension In The Wild

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09884v1
• Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2024 05:52:37 GMT
• Title: Benchmarking Table Comprehension In The Wild
• Authors: Yikang Pan, Yi Zhu, Rand Xie, Yizhi Liu,
• Abstract summary: TableQuest is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the holistic table comprehension capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) We experiment with 7 state-of-the-art models, and find that despite reasonable accuracy in locating facts, they often falter when required to execute more sophisticated reasoning or multi-step calculations.
• Score: 9.224698222634789
• License:
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), while being increasingly dominant on a myriad of knowledge-intensive activities, have only had limited success understanding lengthy table-text mixtures, such as academic papers and financial reports. Recent advances of long-context LLMs have opened up new possibilities for this field. Nonetheless, we identify two roadblocks: (1) Prior benchmarks of table question answering (TableQA) have focused on isolated tables without context, making it hard to evaluate models in real-world scenarios. (2) Prior benchmarks have focused on some narrow skill sets of table comprehension such as table recognition, data manipulation/calculation, table summarization etc., while a skilled human employs those skills collectively. In this work, we introduce TableQuest, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the holistic table comprehension capabilities of LLMs in the natural table-rich context of financial reports. We employ a rigorous data processing and filtering procedure to ensure that the question-answer pairs are logical, reasonable, and diverse. We experiment with 7 state-of-the-art models, and find that despite reasonable accuracy in locating facts, they often falter when required to execute more sophisticated reasoning or multi-step calculations. We conclude with a qualitative study of the failure modes and discuss the challenges of constructing a challenging benchmark. We make the evaluation data, judging procedure and results of this study publicly available to facilitate research in this field.

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