Web Table Retrieval using Multimodal Deep Learning

Abstract

We address the web table retrieval task, aiming to retrieve and rank web tables as whole answers to a given information need. To this end, we formally define web tables as multimodal objects. We then suggest a neural ranking model, termed MTR, which makes a novel use of Gated Multimodal Units (GMUs) to learn a joint-representation of the query and the different table modalities. We further enhance this model with a co-learning approach which utilizes automatically learned query-independent and query-dependent "helper" labels. We evaluate the proposed solution using both ad hoc queries (WikiTables) and natural language questions (GNQtables). Overall, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses the performance of previously studied state-of-the-art baselines.