Arash Dargahi Nobari

Arash Dargahi Nobari, Davood Rafiei

The integration of tabular data from diverse sources is often hindered by inconsistencies in formatting and representation, posing significant challenges for data analysts and personal digital assistants. Existing methods for automating tabular data transformations are limited in scope, often focusing on specific types of transformations or lacking interpretability. In this paper, we introduce TabulaX, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-class column-level tabular transformations. TabulaX first classifies input columns into four transformation types (string-based, numerical, algorithmic, and general) and then applies tailored methods to generate human-interpretable transformation functions, such as numeric formulas or programming code. This approach enhances transparency and allows users to understand and modify the mappings. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets from various domains, we demonstrate that TabulaX outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy, supports a broader class of transformations, and generates interpretable transformations that can be efficiently applied.

Arash Dargahi Nobari, Mahmood Neshati, Sajad Sotudeh Gharebagh

StackOverflow has become an emerging resource for talent recognition in recent years. While users exploit technical language on StackOverflow, recruiters try to find the relevant candidates for jobs using their own terminology. This procedure implies a gap which exists between recruiters and candidates terms. Due to this gap, the state-of-the-art expert finding models cannot effectively address the expert finding problem on StackOverflow. We propose two translation models to bridge this gap. The first approach is a statistical method and the second is based on word embedding approach. Utilizing several translations for a given query during the scoring step, the result of each intermediate query is blended together to obtain the final ranking. Here, we propose a new approach which takes the quality of documents into account in scoring step. We have made several observations to visualize the effectiveness of the translation approaches and also the quality-aware scoring approach. Our experiments indicate the following: First, while statistical and word embedding translation approaches provide different translations for each query, both can considerably improve the recall. Besides, the quality-aware scoring approach can improve the precision remarkably. Finally, our best proposed method can improve the MAP measure up to 46% on average, in comparison with the state-of-the-art expert finding approach.

Arash Dargahi Nobari, Arian Askari, Faegheh Hasibi et al.

Understanding searchers' queries is an essential component of semantic search systems. In many cases, search queries involve specific attributes of an entity in a knowledge base (KB), which can be further used to find query answers. In this study, we aim to move forward the understanding of queries by identifying their related entity attributes from a knowledge base. To this end, we introduce the task of entity attribute identification and propose two methods to address it: (i) a model based on Markov Random Field, and (ii) a learning to rank model. We develop a human annotated test collection and show that our proposed methods can bring significant improvements over the baseline methods.