International Business Machines Corporation
TABLE INDEXING AND RETRIEVAL USING INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC TABLE SIMILARITY MEASURES

Abstract:

Ad-hoc table retrieval, including: Representing each of a plurality of tables as a multi-field text document in which: different modalities of the table are represented as separate fields, and a concatenation of all the modalities is represented as a separate, auxiliary field. Receiving a query. Executing the query on the multi-field text documents, to retrieve a list of preliminarily-ranked candidate tables out of the plurality of tables. Calculating an intrinsic table similarity score for each of the candidate tables, based on the query and the auxiliary field. Calculating an extrinsic table similarity score for each of the candidate tables, based on a cluster hypothesis of the candidate tables. Combining: the preliminary rankings, the intrinsic table similarity scores, and the extrinsic table similarity scores, to re-rank the candidate tables.