Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing benchmarks. Benefiting from multiple pretraining tasks and large scale training corpora, pretrained models can capture complex syntactic word relations. In this paper, we use the deep contextualized language model BERT for the task of ad hoc table retrieval. We investigate how to encode table content considering the table structure and input length limit of BERT. We also propose an approach that incorporates features from prior literature on table retrieval and jointly trains them with BERT. In experiments on public datasets, we show that our best approach can outperform the previous state-of-the-art method and BERT baselines with a large margin under different evaluation metrics.
CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Content analysis and feature selection; Retrieval models and ranking; • Computing methodologies → Search methodologies.
I would like to thank my colleagues in the Multimedia Research Laboratory, and the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department for their friendship and support. Finally, I want to thank my family for their continuous support and unconditional love.
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