A Hybrid Deep Model for Learning to Rank Data Tables

We address the problem of ad hoc table retrieval via a new neural architecture that incorporates both semantic and relevance matching. Understanding the connection between the structured form of a table and query tokens is an important yet neglected problem in information retrieval. We use a learning-to-rank approach to train a system to capture semantic and relevance signals within interactions between the structured form of candidate tables and query tokens. Convolutional filters that extract contextual features from query/table interactions are combined with a feature vector based on the distributions of term similarity between queries and tables. We propose using row and column summaries to incorporate table content into our new neural model. We evaluate our approach using two datasets, and we demonstrate substantial improvements in terms of retrieval metrics over state-of-the-art methods in table retrieval and document retrieval, and neural architectures from sentence, document, and table type classification adapted to the table retrieval task. Our ablation study supports the importance of both semantic and relevance matching in the table retrieval.