Finding relevant tables among databases, lakes, and repositories is the first step in extracting value from data. Such a task remains difficult because assessing whether a table is relevant to a problem does not always depend only on its content but also on the context, which is usually tribal knowledge known to the individual or team. While tools like data catalogs and academic data discovery systems target this problem, they rely on keyword search or more complex interfaces, limiting non-technical users' ability to find relevant data. The advent of large language models (LLMs) offers a unique opportunity for users to ask questions directly in natural language, making dataset discovery more intuitive, accessible, and efficient. In this paper, we introduce Pneuma, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system designed to efficiently and effectively discover tabular data. Pneuma leverages large language models (LLMs) for both table representation and table retrieval. For table representation, Pneuma preserves schema and row-level information to ensure comprehensive data understanding. For table retrieval, Pneuma augments LLMs with traditional information retrieval techniques, such as full-text and vector search, harnessing the strengths of both to improve retrieval performance. To evaluate Pneuma, we generate comprehensive benchmarks that simulate table discovery workload on six real-world datasets including enterprise data, scientific databases, warehousing data, and open data. Our results demonstrate that Pneuma outperforms widely used table search systems (such as full-text search and state-of-the-art RAG systems) in accuracy and resource efficiency.
Enterprises have a growing need to identify relevant tables in data lakes; e.g. tables that are unionable, joinable, or subsets of each other. Tabular neural models can be helpful for such data discovery tasks. In this paper, we present TabSketchFM, a neural tabular model for data discovery over data lakes. First, we propose novel pre-training: a sketch-based approach to enhance the effectiveness of data discovery in neural tabular models. Second, we finetune the pretrained model for identifying unionable, joinable, and subset table pairs and show significant improvement over previous tabular neural models. Third, we present a detailed ablation study to highlight which sketches are crucial for which tasks. Fourth, we use these finetuned models to perform table search; i.e., given a query table, find other tables in a corpus that are unionable, joinable, or that are subsets of the query. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in F1 scores for search compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Finally, we show significant transfer across datasets and tasks establishing that our model can generalize across different tasks and over different data lakes.
There has recently been growing interest in conversational agents with long-term memory which has led to the rapid development of language models that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Until recently, most work on RAG has focused on information retrieval from large databases of texts, like Wikipedia, rather than information from long-form conversations. In this paper, we argue that effective retrieval from long-form conversational data faces two unique problems compared to static database retrieval: 1) time/event-based queries, which requires the model to retrieve information about previous conversations based on time or the order of a conversational event (e.g., the third conversation on Tuesday), and 2) ambiguous queries that require surrounding conversational context to understand. To better develop RAG-based agents that can deal with these challenges, we generate a new dataset of ambiguous and time-based questions that build upon a recent dataset of long-form, simulated conversations, and demonstrate that standard RAG based approaches handle such questions poorly. We then develop a novel retrieval model which combines chained-of-table search methods, standard vector-database retrieval, and a prompting method to disambiguate queries, and demonstrate that this approach substantially improves over current methods at solving these tasks. We believe that this new dataset and more advanced RAG agent can act as a key benchmark and stepping stone towards effective memory augmented conversational agents that can be used in a wide variety of AI applications.
This research concerns Learned Data Structures, a recent area that has emerged at the crossroad of Machine Learning and Classic Data Structures. It is methodologically important and with a high practical impact. We focus on Learned Indexes, i.e., Learned Sorted Set Dictionaries. The proposals available so far are specific in the sense that they can boost, indeed impressively, the time performance of Table Search Procedures with a sorted layout only, e.g., Binary Search. We propose a novel paradigm that, complementing known specialized ones, can produce Learned versions of any Sorted Set Dictionary, for instance, Balanced Binary Search Trees or Binary Search on layouts other that sorted, i.e., Eytzinger. Theoretically, based on it, we obtain several results of interest, such as (a) the first Learned Optimum Binary Search Forest, with mean access time bounded by the Entropy of the probability distribution of the accesses to the Dictionary; (b) the first Learned Sorted Set Dictionary that, in the Dynamic Case and in an amortized analysis setting, matches the same time bounds known for Classic Dictionaries. This latter under widely accepted assumptions regarding the size of the Universe. The experimental part, somewhat complex in terms of software development, clearly indicates the nonobvious finding that the generalization we propose can yield effective and competitive Learned Data Structural Booster, even with respect to specific benchmark models.
Data management has traditionally relied on synthetic data generators to generate structured benchmarks, like the TPC suite, where we can control important parameters like data size and its distribution precisely. These benchmarks were central to the success and adoption of database management systems. But more and more, data management problems are of a semantic nature. An important example is finding tables that can be unioned. While any two tables with the same cardinality can be unioned, table union search is the problem of finding tables whose union is semantically coherent. Semantic problems cannot be benchmarked using synthetic data. Our current methods for creating benchmarks involve the manual curation and labeling of real data. These methods are not robust or scalable and perhaps more importantly, it is not clear how robust the created benchmarks are. We propose to use generative AI models to create structured data benchmarks for table union search. We present a novel method for using generative models to create tables with specified properties. Using this method, we create a new benchmark containing pairs of tables that are both unionable and non-unionable but related. We thoroughly evaluate recent existing table union search methods over existing benchmarks and our new benchmark. We also present and evaluate a new table search methods based on recent large language models over all benchmarks. We show that the new benchmark is more challenging for all methods than hand-curated benchmarks, specifically, the top-performing method achieves a Mean Average Precision of around 60%, over 30% less than its performance on existing manually created benchmarks. We examine why this is the case and show that the new benchmark permits more detailed analysis of methods, including a study of both false positives and false negatives that were not possible with existing benchmarks.
A large amount of information is stored in data tables. Users can search for data tables using a keyword-based query. A table is composed primarily of data values that are organized in rows and columns providing implicit structural information. A table is usually accompanied by secondary information such as the caption, page title, etc., that form the textual information. Understanding the connection between the textual and structural information is an important yet neglected aspect in table retrieval as previous methods treat each source of information independently. In addition, users can search for data tables that are similar to an existing table, and this setting can be seen as a content-based table retrieval. In this paper, we propose StruBERT, a structure-aware BERT model that fuses the textual and structural information of a data table to produce context-aware representations for both textual and tabular content of a data table. StruBERT features are integrated in a new end-to-end neural ranking model to solve three table-related downstream tasks: keyword- and content-based table retrieval, and table similarity. We evaluate our approach using three datasets, and we demonstrate substantial improvements in terms of retrieval and classification metrics over state-of-the-art methods.
Machine Learning Techniques, properly combined with Data Structures, have resulted in Learned Static Indexes, innovative and powerful tools that speed-up Binary Search, with the use of additional space with respect to the table being searched into. Such space is devoted to the Machine Learning Model. Although in their infancy, they are methodologically and practically important, due to the pervasiveness of Sorted Table Search procedures. In modern applications, model space is a key factor and, in fact, a major open question concerning this area is to assess to what extent one can enjoy the speed-up of Binary Search achieved by Learned Indexes while using constant or nearly constant space models. In this paper, we investigate the mentioned question by (a) introducing two new models, i.e., the Learned k-ary Search Model and the Synoptic Recursive Model Index, respectively; (b) systematically exploring the time-space trade-offs of a hierarchy of existing models, i.e., the ones in the reference software platform Searching on Sorted Data, together with the new ones proposed here. By adhering and extending the current benchmarking methodology, we experimentally show that the Learned k-ary Search Model can speed up Binary Search in constant additional space. Our second model, together with the bi-criteria Piece-wise Geometric Model index, can achieve a speed-up of Binary Search with a model space of 0:05% more than the one taken by the table, being competitive in terms of time-space trade-off with existing proposals. The Synoptic Recursive Model Index and the bi-criteria Piece-wise Geometric Model complement each other quite well across the various levels of the internal memory hierarchy. Finally, our findings stimulate research in this area, since they highlight the need for further studies regarding the time-space relation in Learned Indexes.
The task of natural language table retrieval (NLTR) seeks to retrieve semantically relevant tables based on natural language queries. Existing learning systems for this task often treat tables as plain text based on the assumption that tables are structured as dataframes. However, tables can have complex layouts which indicate diverse dependencies between subtable structures, such as nested headers. As a result, queries may refer to different spans of relevant content that is distributed across these structures. Moreover, such systems fail to generalize to novel scenarios beyond those seen in the training set. Prior methods are still distant from a generalizable solution to the NLTR problem, as they fall short in handling complex table layouts or queries over multiple granularities. To address these issues, we propose Graph-based Table Retrieval (GTR), a generalizable NLTR framework with multi-granular graph representation learning. In our framework, a table is first converted into a tabular graph, with cell nodes, row nodes and column nodes to capture content at different granularities. Then the tabular graph is input to a Graph Transformer model that can capture both table cell content and the layout structures. To enhance the robustness and generalizability of the model, we further incorporate a self-supervised pre-training task based on graph-context matching. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that our method leads to significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art systems. Further experiments demonstrate promising performance of our method on cross-dataset generalization, and enhanced capability of handling complex tables and fulfilling diverse query intents. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FeiWang96/GTR.