Ad Hoc Table Retrieval using Semantic Similarity

Understand

We introduce and address the problem of ad hoc table retrieval: answering a keyword query with a ranked list of tables.

• This task is not only interesting on its own account, but is also being used as a core component in many other table-based information access scenarios, such as table completion or table mining.
• The main novel contribution of this work is a method for performing semantic matching between queries and tables.
• Specifically, we (i) represent queries and tables in multiple semantic spaces (both discrete sparse and continuous dense vector representations) and (ii) introduce various similarity measures for matching those semantic representations.