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SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types

  • Xuanliang Zhang*
  • , Dingzirui Wang
  • , Baoxin Wang
  • , Longxu Dou
  • , Xinyuan Lu
  • , Keyan Xu
  • , Dayong Wu
  • , Qingfu Zhu
  • , Wanxiang Che*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Harbin Institute of Technology
  • iFLYTEK Research
  • Individual Researcher
  • National University of Singapore

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SCITAT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To reason on both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SCITAT, we propose a baseline (CAR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CAR brings average improvements of 4.1% over other baselines on SCITAT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SCITAT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationACL 2025
EditorsWanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3859-3881
Number of pages23
ISBN (Electronic)9798891762565
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025 - Vienna, Austria
Duration: 27 Jul 20251 Aug 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period27/07/251/08/25

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