Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. We first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. We also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/UCTR.

Fact verification has attracted a lot of research attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and disinformation online can sway one's opinion and affect one's actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table-based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, in this paper we introduce PASTA, a novel state-of-the-art framework for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence-table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence-table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence-table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pretrains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two table-based fact verification benchmarks: TabFact and SEM-TAB-FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms the previous state of the art by 4.7 points (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small TabFact test set is narrowed to just 1.5 points (90.6% vs. 92.1%).

最近的语言模型预培训进展取得了巨大的成功，通过利用大规模的非结构化文本数据。然而，由于没有大规模的高质量表格数据，在结构化的表格数据上应用预先培训仍然是一项挑战。在本文中，我们提出了Tapex，以表明通过在合成语料库上学习神经SQL执行程序来实现表预培训，这是通过自动合成可执行的SQL查询和执行输出来获得的。 Tapex通过引导语言模型来模仿SQL执行程序的不同，大规模和高质量的合成语料库来解决数据稀缺性挑战。我们在四个基准数据集中评估Tapex。实验结果表明，Tapex优于以前的表格预训练，并通过大幅度达到了新的最先进的结果。这包括改进弱监管的WikiSQL表示精度为89.5％（+ 2.3％），WikityQuestions表示精度为57.5％（+ 4.8％），SQA表示精度为74.5％（+ 3.5％）和Tabfact精度84.2％（+ 3.2％）。为了我们的知识，这是通过合成可执行程序利用表预培训的第一项工作，并在各种下游任务上实现新的最先进结果。

Table-and-text hybrid question answering (HybridQA) is a widely used and challenging NLP task commonly applied in the financial and scientific domain. The early research focuses on migrating other QA task methods to HybridQA, while with further research, more and more HybridQA-specific methods have been present. With the rapid development of HybridQA, the systematic survey is still under-explored to summarize the main techniques and advance further research. So we present this work to summarize the current HybridQA benchmarks and methods, then analyze the challenges and future directions of this task. The contributions of this paper can be summarized in three folds: (1) first survey, to our best knowledge, including benchmarks, methods and challenges for HybridQA; (2) systematic investigation with the reasonable comparison of the existing systems to articulate their advantages and shortcomings; (3) detailed analysis of challenges in four important dimensions to shed light on future directions.

文本到SQL解析是一项必不可少且具有挑战性的任务。文本到SQL解析的目的是根据关系数据库提供的证据将自然语言（NL）问题转换为其相应的结构性查询语言（SQL）。来自数据库社区的早期文本到SQL解析系统取得了显着的进展，重度人类工程和用户与系统的互动的成本。近年来，深层神经网络通过神经生成模型显着提出了这项任务，该模型会自动学习从输入NL问题到输出SQL查询的映射功能。随后，大型的预训练的语言模型将文本到SQL解析任务的最新作品带到了一个新级别。在这项调查中，我们对文本到SQL解析的深度学习方法进行了全面的评论。首先，我们介绍了文本到SQL解析语料库，可以归类为单转和多转。其次，我们提供了预先训练的语言模型和现有文本解析方法的系统概述。第三，我们向读者展示了文本到SQL解析所面临的挑战，并探索了该领域的一些潜在未来方向。

表中的信息可能是文本的重要补充，使基于表的问题答案（QA）具有巨大的价值。处理表的内在复杂性通常会增加模型设计和数据注释的额外负担。在本文中，我们旨在以最少的注释工作开发一个简单的基于表的质量检查模型。由于基于表的质量检查需要问题和表之间的对齐方式以及在多个表元素上执行复杂推理的能力，因此我们提出了一种杂食性的预读方法，该方法既可以消耗自然数据，又提出了合成数据，以使模型具有这些各自的能力。具体而言，鉴于可免费获得的表，我们利用检索将它们与相关的自然句子配对，以进行掩盖预处理，并通过将SQL从表中进行转换为QA损失进行预处理而合成NL问题。我们在几次和完整的设置中都进行了广泛的实验，结果清楚地证明了模型omnitab的优势，最好的多任务方法分别实现了16.2％和2.7％的绝对增益，在128次和完整的设置中也获得了2.7％建立有关Wickitable Questions的最新最新。详细的消融和分析揭示了自然和合成数据的不同特征，从而阐明了杂食性预处理的未来方向。可以在https://github.com/jzbjyb/omnitab上获得代码，预读数据和预算模型。

随着未来以数据为中心的决策，对数据库的无缝访问至关重要。关于创建有效的文本到SQL（Text2SQL）模型以访问数据库的数据有广泛的研究。使用自然语言是可以通过有效访问数据库（尤其是对于非技术用户）来弥合数据和结果之间差距的最佳接口之一。它将打开门，并在精通技术技能或不太熟练的查询语言的用户中引起极大的兴趣。即使提出或研究了许多基于深度学习的算法，在现实工作场景中使用自然语言来解决数据查询问题仍然非常具有挑战性。原因是在不同的研究中使用不同的数据集，这带来了其局限性和假设。同时，我们确实缺乏对这些提议的模型及其对其训练的特定数据集的局限性的彻底理解。在本文中，我们试图介绍过去几年研究的24种神经网络模型的整体概述，包括其涉及卷积神经网络，经常性神经网络，指针网络，强化学习，生成模型等的架构。我们还概述11个数据集，这些数据集被广泛用于训练Text2SQL技术的模型。我们还讨论了无缝数据查询中文本2SQL技术的未来应用可能性。

知识基础问题回答（KBQA）旨在通过知识库（KB）回答问题。早期研究主要集中于回答有关KB的简单问题，并取得了巨大的成功。但是，他们在复杂问题上的表现远非令人满意。因此，近年来，研究人员提出了许多新颖的方法，研究了回答复杂问题的挑战。在这项调查中，我们回顾了KBQA的最新进展，重点是解决复杂问题，这些问题通常包含多个主题，表达复合关系或涉及数值操作。详细说明，我们从介绍复杂的KBQA任务和相关背景开始。然后，我们描述用于复杂KBQA任务的基准数据集，并介绍这些数据集的构建过程。接下来，我们提出两个复杂KBQA方法的主流类别，即基于语义解析的方法（基于SP）的方法和基于信息检索的方法（基于IR）。具体而言，我们通过流程设计说明了他们的程序，并讨论了它们的主要差异和相似性。之后，我们总结了这两类方法在回答复杂问题时会遇到的挑战，并解释了现有工作中使用的高级解决方案和技术。最后，我们结论并讨论了与复杂的KBQA有关的几个有希望的方向，以进行未来的研究。

自动问题应答（QA）系统的目的是以时间有效的方式向用户查询提供答案。通常在数据库（或知识库）或通常被称为语料库的文件集合中找到答案。在过去的几十年里，收购知识的扩散，因此生物医学领域的新科学文章一直是指数增长。因此，即使对于领域专家，也难以跟踪域中的所有信息。随着商业搜索引擎的改进，用户可以在某些情况下键入其查询并获得最相关的一小组文档，以及在某些情况下从文档中的相关片段。但是，手动查找所需信息或答案可能仍然令人疑惑和耗时。这需要开发高效的QA系统，该系统旨在为用户提供精确和精确的答案提供了生物医学领域的自然语言问题。在本文中，我们介绍了用于开发普通域QA系统的基本方法，然后彻底调查生物医学QA系统的不同方面，包括使用结构化数据库和文本集合的基准数据集和几种提出的方​​法。我们还探讨了当前系统的局限性，并探索潜在的途径以获得进一步的进步。

学习捕获文本表对齐对于文本到SQL等任务至关重要。一个模型需要正确识别对列和值的自然语言引用，并在给定的数据库架构中将其扎根。在本文中，我们为文本到SQL提出了一个新颖的弱监督结构接地预处理框架（strug），可以有效地学习基于平行的文本表语料库来捕获文本表对齐。我们确定了一组新的预测任务：列接地，价值接地和列值映射，并利用它们为文本表编码预处理。此外，为了评估更现实的文本表对齐设置下的不同方法，我们基于蜘蛛dev设置的新评估集蜘蛛现实化，并明确提及已删除的列名，并采用八个现有的文本到SQL数据集以进行交叉 - 数据库评估。在所有设置中，Strug对Bert-Large都有显着改善。与现有的预训练方法（例如Grappa）相比，Strug在蜘蛛方面的性能相似，并且在更现实的集合上都优于所有基线。蜘蛛现实的数据集可从https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5205322获得。

在现实世界中的问题回答场景中，将表格和文本内容均结合的混合形式吸引了越来越多的关注，其中数值推理问题是最典型和最具挑战性的问题之一。现有方法通常采用编码器框架来表示混合内容并生成答案。但是，它无法捕获编码器侧数值，表格架构和文本信息之间的丰富关系。解码器使用一个简单的预定义运算符分类器，该分类器的灵活性不足以处理具有不同表达式的数值推理过程。为了解决这些问题，本文提出了一个\ textbf {re} lational \ textbf {g} raph增强\ textbf {h} ybrid table-text \ textbf {n}带有\ textbf {t textbf {t text} ree decoder（\ textbff recoder（\ textbf） {reghnt}）。它模拟了对表 - 文本混合内容的回答的数值问题，作为表达树的生成任务。此外，我们提出了一种新颖的关系图建模方法，该方法模拟了问题，表和段落之间的对齐方式。我们验证了公开可用的Table-Text混合质量质量质量标准（TAT-QA）的模型。拟议的reghnt显着胜过基线模型，并实现最新结果\脚注{我们在〜\ url {https://github.com/lfy79001/reghnt}}}〜（20222）公开发布了源代码和数据-05-05）。

目前用于开放域问题的最先进的生成模型（ODQA）专注于从非结构化文本信息生成直接答案。但是，大量的世界知识存储在结构化数据库中，并且需要使用SQL等查询语言访问。此外，查询语言可以回答需要复杂推理的问题，以及提供完全的解释性。在本文中，我们提出了一个混合框架，将文本和表格证据占据了输入，并根据哪种形式更好地回答这个问题而生成直接答案或SQL查询。然后可以在关联的数据库上执行生成的SQL查询以获得最终答案。据我们所知，这是第一种将Text2SQL与ODQA任务应用于ODQA任务的论文。凭经验，我们证明，在几个ODQA数据集上，混合方法始终如一地优于仅采用大边缘的均匀输入的基线模型。具体地，我们使用T5基础模型实现OpenSquad数据集的最先进的性能。在一个详细的分析中，我们证明能够生成结构的SQL查询可以始终带来增益，特别是对于那些需要复杂推理的问题。

Multi-hop Machine reading comprehension is a challenging task with aim of answering a question based on disjoint pieces of information across the different passages. The evaluation metrics and datasets are a vital part of multi-hop MRC because it is not possible to train and evaluate models without them, also, the proposed challenges by datasets often are an important motivation for improving the existing models. Due to increasing attention to this field, it is necessary and worth reviewing them in detail. This study aims to present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in multi-hop MRC evaluation metrics and datasets. In this regard, first, the multi-hop MRC problem definition will be presented, then the evaluation metrics based on their multi-hop aspect will be investigated. Also, 15 multi-hop datasets have been reviewed in detail from 2017 to 2022, and a comprehensive analysis has been prepared at the end. Finally, open issues in this field have been discussed.

实体链接旨在将模棱两可的提及与知识库中的相应实体联系起来，这对于各种下游应用程序是重要的，例如知识库完成，问题答案和信息提取。尽管已经致力于这项任务，但这些研究中的大多数遵循以下假设，即可以使用大规模标记的数据。但是，当由于劳动密集型注释工作而导致的标记数据不足以针对特定领域时，现有算法的性能将遭受无法忍受的下降。在本文中，我们努力解决了几个弹药实体链接的问题，这只需要最少的标记数据，并且在实际情况下更为实用。具体而言，我们首先提出了一种新颖的弱监督策略，以基于提及的重写生成非平凡的合成实体对。由于合成数据的质量对有效的模型训练有关键的影响，因此我们进一步设计了一种元学习机制，以自动为每个合成实体对分配不同的权重。通过这种方式，我们可以深刻利用丰富而宝贵的语义信息，从而在几个射击设置下得出训练有素的实体链接模型。现实世界数据集上的实验表明，所提出的方法可以广泛改善最新的几杆实体链接模型，并在只有少量标记的数据可用时实现令人印象深刻的性能。此外，我们还展示了模型可传递性的出色能力。

使用来自表格（TableQA）的信息回答自然语言问题是最近的兴趣。在许多应用程序中，表未孤立，但嵌入到非结构化文本中。通常，通过将其部分与表格单元格内容或非结构化文本跨度匹配，并从任一源中提取答案来最佳地回答问题。这导致了HybridQA数据集引入的TextableQA问题的新空间。现有的表格表示对基于变换器的阅读理解（RC）架构的适应性未通过单个系统解决两个表示的不同模式。培训此类系统因对遥远监督的需求而进一步挑战。为了降低认知负担，培训实例通常包括问题和答案，后者匹配多个表行和文本段。这导致嘈杂的多实例培训制度不仅涉及表的行，而且涵盖了链接文本的跨度。我们通过提出Mitqa来回应这些挑战，这是一个新的TextableQA系统，明确地模拟了表行选择和文本跨度选择的不同但密切相关的概率空间。与最近的基线相比，我们的实验表明了我们的方法的优越性。该方法目前在HybridQA排行榜的顶部，并进行了一个试验集，在以前公布的结果上实现了对em和f1的21％的绝对改善。

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

Long-form numerical reasoning in financial analysis aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the correct answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numbers. Meanwhile, the program consistency were ignored under supervised training, resulting in lower training accuracy and diversity. To solve these problems, we proposed APOLLO to improve the long-form numerical reasoning framework. For the retriever, we adopt a number-aware negative sampling strategy to enable the retriever to be more discriminative on key numerical facts. For the generator, we design consistency-based reinforcement learning and target program augmentation strategy based on the consistency of program execution results. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboard verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the new state-of-the-art.

表问题回答（表QA）是指从表中提供精确的答案来回答用户的问题。近年来，在表质量检查方面有很多作品，但是对该研究主题缺乏全面的调查。因此，我们旨在提供表QA中可用数据集和代表性方法的概述。我们根据其技术将现有的表质量质量质量检查分为五个类别，其中包括基于语义的，生成，提取，基于匹配的基于匹配的方法和基于检索的方法。此外，由于表质量质量质量检查仍然是现有方法的一项艰巨的任务，因此我们还识别和概述了一些关键挑战，并讨论了表质量质量检查的潜在未来方向。

Parsing natural language questions into executable logical forms is a useful and interpretable way to perform question answering on structured data such as knowledge bases (KB) or databases (DB). However, existing approaches on semantic parsing cannot adapt to both modalities, as they suffer from the exponential growth of the logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data. In this work, we propose Uni-Parser, a unified semantic parser for question answering (QA) on both KB and DB. We introduce the primitive (relation and entity in KB, and table name, column name and cell value in DB) as an essential element in our framework. The number of primitives grows linearly with the number of retrieved relations in KB and DB, preventing us from dealing with exponential logic form candidates. We leverage the generator to predict final logical forms by altering and composing topranked primitives with different operations (e.g. select, where, count). With sufficiently pruned search space by a contrastive primitive ranker, the generator is empowered to capture the composition of primitives enhancing its generalization ability. We achieve competitive results on multiple KB and DB QA benchmarks more efficiently, especially in the compositional and zero-shot settings.