WikiTableQuestions Dataset

Version 1.0.2 (October 4, 2016)

Introduction

The WikiTableQuestions dataset is for the task of question answering on semi-structured HTML tables as presented in the paper:

Panupong Pasupat, Percy Liang.
Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2015.

More details about the project: https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sempre/wikitable/

TSV Format

Many files in this dataset are stored as tab-separated values (TSV) with the following special constructs:

• List items are separated by | (e.g., when|was|taylor|swift|born|?).

• The following characters are escaped: newline (=> \n), backslash (\ => \\), and pipe (| => \p) Note that pipes become \p so that doing x.split('|') will work.

• Consecutive whitespaces (except newlines) are collapsed into a single space.

Questions and Answers

The data/ directory contains the questions, answers, and the ID of the tables that the questions are asking about.

Each portion of the dataset is stored as a TSV file where each line contains one example.

Field descriptions:

• id: unique ID of the example
• utterance: the question in its original format
• context: the table used to answer the question
• targetValue: the answer, possibly a |-separated list

Dataset Splits: We split 22033 examples into multiple sets:

• training: Training data (14152 examples)

• pristine-unseen-tables: Test data -- the tables are not seen in training data (4344 examples)

• pristine-seen-tables: Additional data where the tables are seen in training data. (3537 examples) (Initially intended to be used as development data, this portion of the dataset has not been used in any experiment in the paper.)

• random-split-*: For development, we split training.tsv into random 80-20 splits. Within each split, tables in the training data (random-split-seed-*-train) and the test data (random-split-seed-*-test) are disjoint.

• training-before300: The first 300 training examples.

• annotated-all.examples: The first 300 training examples annotated with gold logical forms.

For our ACL 2015 paper:

• In development set experiments: we trained on random-split-seed-{1,2,3}-train and tested on random-split-seed-{1,2,3}-test, respectively.

• In test set experiments: we trained on training and tested on pristine-unseen-tables.

Supplementary Files:

• *.examples files: The LispTree format of the dataset is used internally in our SEMPRE code base. The *.examples files contain the same information as the TSV files.

Tables

The csv/ directory contains the extracted tables, while the page/ directory contains the raw HTML data of the whole web page.

Table Formats:

• csv/xxx-csv/yyy.csv: Comma-separated table (The first row is treated as the column header) The escaped characters include: double quote (" => \") and backslash (\ => \\). Newlines are represented as quoted line breaks.

• csv/xxx-csv/yyy.tsv: Tab-separated table. The TSV escapes explained at the beginning are used.

• csv/xxx-csv/yyy.table: Human-readable column-aligned table. Some information was loss during data conversion, so this format should not be used as an input.

• csv/xxx-csv/yyy.html: Formatted HTML of just the table

• page/xxx-page/yyy.html: Raw HTML of the whole web page

• page/xxx-page/yyy.json: Metadata including the URL, the page title, and the index of the chosen table. (Only tables with the wikitable class are considered.)

The conversion from HTML to CSV and TSV was done using table-to-tsv.py. Its dependency is in the weblib/ directory.

CoreNLP Tagged Files

Questions and tables are tagged using CoreNLP 3.5.2. The annotation is not perfect (e.g., it cannot detect the date "13-12-1989"), but it is usually good enough.

• tagged/data/*.tagged: Tagged questions. Each line contains one example.

  Field descriptions:

  • id: unique ID of the example
  • utterance: the question in its original format
  • context: the table used to answer the question
  • targetValue: the answer, possibly a |-separated list
  • tokens: the question, tokenized
  • lemmaTokens: the question, tokenized and lemmatized
  • posTags: the part of speech tag of each token
  • nerTags: the name entity tag of each token
  • nerValues: if the NER tag is numerical or temporal, the value of that NER span will be listed here
  • targetCanon: canonical form of the answers where numbers and dates are converted into normalized values
  • targetCanonType: type of the canonical answers; possible values include "number", "date", "string", and "mixed"

• tagged/xxx-tagged/yyy.tagged: Tab-separated file containing the CoreNLP annotation of each table cell. Each line represents one table cell.

  Mandatory fields:

  • row: row index (-1 is the header row)
  • col: column index
  • id: unique ID of the cell.
    • Each header cell gets a unique ID even when the contents are identical
    • Non-header cells get the same ID if they have exactly the same content
  • content: the cell text (images and hidden spans are removed)
  • tokens: the cell text, tokenized
  • lemmaTokens: the cell text, tokenized and lemmatized
  • posTags: the part of speech tag of each token
  • nerTags: the name entity tag of each token
  • nerValues: if the NER tag is numerical or temporal, the value of that NER span will be listed here

  The following fields are optional:

  • number: interpretation as a number (for multiple numbers, the first number is extracted)
  • date: interpretation as a date
  • num2: the second number in the cell (useful for scores like 1-2)
  • list: interpretation as a list of items

  Header cells do not have these optional fields.

Evaluator

evaluator.py is the official evaluator.

Usage: evaluator.py <tagged_dataset_path> <prediction_path>

• tagged_dataset_path should be a dataset .tagged file containing the relevant examples

• prediction_path should contain predictions from the model. Each line should contain ex_id item1 item2 ... If the model does not produce a prediction, just output ex_id without the items.

Note that the resulting scores will be different from what SEMPRE produces as SEMPRE also enforces the prediction to have the same type as the target value, while the official evaluator is more lenient.

Version History

1.0 - Fixed various bugs in datasets (encoding issues, number normalization issues)

0.5 - Added evaluator

0.4 - Added annotated logical forms of the first 300 examples / Renamed CoreNLP tagged data as tagged to avoid confusion

0.3 - Repaired table headers / Added raw HTML tables / Added CoreNLP tagged data

0.2 - Initial release

For questions and comments, please contact Ice Pasupat ppasupat@cs.stanford.edu