Tables are widely used in various kinds of documents to present information concisely. Understanding tables is a challenging problem that requires an understanding of language and table structure, along with numerical and logical reasoning. In this p
aper, we present our systems to solve Task 9 of SemEval-2021: Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables (SEM-TAB-FACTS). The task consists of two subtasks: (A) Given a table and a statement, predicting whether the table supports the statement and (B) Predicting which cells in the table provide evidence for/against the statement. We fine-tune TAPAS (a model which extends BERT's architecture to capture tabular structure) for both the subtasks as it has shown state-of-the-art performance in various table understanding tasks. In subtask A, we evaluate how transfer learning and standardizing tables to have a single header row improves TAPAS' performance. In subtask B, we evaluate how different fine-tuning strategies can improve TAPAS' performance. Our systems achieve an F1 score of 67.34 in subtask A three-way classification, 72.89 in subtask A two-way classification, and 62.95 in subtask B.
This paper describes the system submitted in the SemEval-2021 Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables task. The system relies on candidate generation for logical forms on the table based on keyword matching and dependency parsing on the claim statements.
