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        <article-title>A Framework for Automatically Interpreting Tabular Data at Orange</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Yoan Chabot</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Pierre Monnin</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Frédéric Deuzé</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Viet-Phi Huynh</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Thomas Labbé</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Jixiong Liu</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Raphaël Troncy</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Orange</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>France yoan.chabot@orange.com</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>EURECOM</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>France raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr</string-name>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Making Sense of Tables: DAGOBAH</string-name>
        </contrib>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Large parts of knowledge of companies are encoded in tabular data. Being able to interpret such data is key to increase business efficiency and to propose innovative services, and Orange is no exception. With more than 140,000 employees worldwide and a heterogeneous client portfolio, Orange produces a phenomenal amount of tabular data every day. These tables are viscerally embedded in internal services and products (e.g., network logs, multimedia catalogs). Hence, they are a source to discover new knowledge. Although this encourages the development of efficient tools to process them, several issues are negatively impacting their use. First, the volume curse makes difficult to identify the right dataset for a given use case. Then, the knowledge gap between data producers/consumers is exacerbated by our language footprint (seven main languages), the heterogeneous tools producing various table formats, and the experience/jobs of employees leading to similar concepts being expressed by diferent terms across tables. One lever to address these challenges resides in Semantic Table Interpretation (STI), i.e., making tabular data intelligently processable by matching elements of tables and constituents of Knowledge Graphs (e.g., Wikidata or specific domain/enterprise ones). Providing semantic annotations is a key asset for search/recommendation engines and natural language based services. Moreover, KGs can be used to drive STI while being themselves enriched by STI's results. Indeed, transferring knowledge to KGs allows previously dormant knowledge to be structured and queried efficiently. In this view, Orange/EURECOM research teams have developed DAGOBAH, a framework interpreting tables automatically. DAGOBAH is packaged in a RESTful API named TableAnnotation on</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>On the Importance of Interpreting Tabular Data</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
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        the Orange Developer portal3. DAGOBAH ofers four features: i) preprocessing
(data cleaning, primitive typing, table orientation, etc.), ii) Cell-Entity
Annotation associating each cell with a KG entity, iii) Column-Type Annotation typing
each column with a KG concept, and iv) Columns-Property Annotation
identifying properties between table columns. It comes also in two flavours: DAGOBAH
SL based on a smart lookup of entities which are then disambiguated by
comparing the context given by the table row under study with the context of the
candidates in the KG; DAGOBAH Embeddings exploiting geometric properties
of vector spaces to cluster candidates. While computationally more expensive,
embeddings provide promising results on highly ambiguous tables. These two
approaches have proven to be competitive during the SemTab challenge [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref3">1, 3</xref>
        ].
Future Work
Interpreting tables has become a crucial task attracting a lot of attention in
recent years and the SemTab challenge [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] provides a relevant forum for comparing
approaches. However, there is still a long way to go to support the richness of
tables stored in company repositories. In particular, two limitations have been
identified in the current gold standards: 1) tables are generally homogeneously
shaped and the noise artificially generated does not represent the real world
complexities spectrum, and 2) target KGs are mostly encyclopaedic or limited
to very specific domains. A challenge will be to propose datasets encoding more
difficulties such as matrix tables or multi-values cells. Another challenge Orange
will face is the application of annotation techniques to tables derived from
business knowledge. This requires the development of Orange’s own KG that focuses
on its activities, following the accelerating trend of Enterprise KGs. This raises
difficult questions such as how to support our various business areas and how
to bootstrap such a KG from publicly available KGs? It also requires a complex
pipeline as demonstrated by Amazon’s Product Graph [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. To this aim, Orange’s
future research work will be structured along the harvesting of the company’s
tabular data, the complementarity of text/tables in the knowledge extraction
process, and the reconciliation of knowledge in a high quality KG.
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