Tabular-TX: Theme-Explanation Structure-based Table Summarization via In-Context Learning

This paper proposes a Theme-Explanation Structure-based Table Summarization (Tabular-TX) pipeline designed to efficiently process table data. Tabular-TX preprocesses table data by focusing on highlighted cells and then generates summary sentences structured with a Theme Part in the form of adverbial phrases followed by an Explanation Part in the form of clauses. In this process, customized analysis is performed by considering the structural characteristics and comparability of the table. Additionally, by utilizing In-Context Learning, Tabular-TX optimizes the analytical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without the need for fine-tuning, effectively handling the structural complexity of table data. Results from applying the proposed Tabular-TX to generate table-based summaries demonstrated superior performance compared to existing fine-tuning-based methods, despite limitations in dataset size. Experimental results confirmed that Tabular-TX can process complex table data more effectively and established it as a new alternative for table-based question answering and summarization tasks, particularly in resource-constrained environments.