TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding

Understand

Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding.

• Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias.
• Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations.
• Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability.