Sato: Contextual Semantic Type Detection in Tables

Summary: Sato detects column semantic types by using table-context signals with column values. A hybrid model fuses deep learning on table corpora, topic modeling, and structured prediction, delivering F1 0.925 (support-weighted) and 0.735 (macro), surpassing prior work. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12271
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 8.9189986e-05
Overall Rank: 2,223 | 84.75%
DOI: 10.14778/3407790.3407793

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Dan Zhang (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
2. Yoshihiko Suhara (Megagon Labs)
3. Jinfeng Li (Megagon Labs)
4. Madelon Hulsebos (The HEINEKEN Company)
5. Çağatay Demiralp (Megagon Labs)
6. Wang-Chiew Tan (Megagon Labs)

BibTeX Citation

@article{zhang_vldb20,
        title = {{Sato: Contextual Semantic Type Detection in Tables}},
        author = {Zhang, Dan and Suhara, Yoshihiko and Li, Jinfeng and Hulsebos, Madelon and Demiralp, Çağatay and Tan, Wang-Chiew},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '20},
        volume = {13},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1835--1848},
        doi = {10.14778/3407790.3407793},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3407790.3407793},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 25 of 25 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,756	SystemDS: A Declarative Machine Learning System for the End-to-End Data Science Lifecycle	2020	CIDR	9.8172465e-05
1,923	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD	9.4789109e-05
2,099	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.1682353e-05
2,192	Semantics-aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-based Representation Learning	2023	VLDB	8.9767241e-05
2,242	CHORUS: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and Exploration	2024	VLDB	8.8823802e-05
2,315	SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search	2023	SIGMOD	8.7605101e-05
3,073	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB	7.785842e-05
3,536	How Large Language Models Will Disrupt Data Management	2023	VLDB	7.3297343e-05
4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.7168614e-05
4,515	ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB	6.6492389e-05
4,966	Rotom: A Meta-Learned Data Augmentation Framework for Entity Matching, Data Cleaning, Text Classification, and Beyond	2021	SIGMOD	6.4225454e-05
5,479	MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction	2022	VLDB	6.204351e-05
5,816	Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables	2024	VLDB	6.0776454e-05
7,572	Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes	2023	VLDB	5.5938952e-05
7,690	Auto-Validate: Unsupervised Data Validation Using Data-Domain Patterns Inferred from Data Lakes	2021	SIGMOD	5.5669307e-05
7,893	LakeBench: A Benchmark for Discovering Joinable and Unionable Tables in Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	5.5209866e-05
8,144	WarpGate: A Semantic Join Discovery System for Cloud Data Warehouses	2023	CIDR	5.4800625e-05
8,458	RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework	2023	VLDB	5.4217059e-05
8,860	Watchog: A Light-weight Contrastive Learning based Framework for Column Annotation	2023	SIGMOD	5.3564029e-05
8,906	Unveiling Challenges for LLMs in Enterprise Data Engineering	2026	VLDB	5.3483178e-05
9,436	GIO: Generating Efficient Matrix and Frame Readers for Custom Data Formats by Example	2023	SIGMOD	5.2692207e-05
9,972	Cents: A Flexible and Cost-Effective Framework for LLM-Based Table Understanding	2025	VLDB	5.1845938e-05
10,399	Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,431	AutoDDG: Automated Dataset Description Generation using Large Language Models	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,406	Steered Training Data Generation for Learned Semantic Type Detection	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
65	Freebase: A Collaboratively Created Graph Database For Structuring Human Knowledge	2008	SIGMOD	0.00038697603
91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00034838835
94	Potter's Wheel: An Interactive Data Cleaning System	2001	VLDB	0.00034616103
317	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB	0.00021402049
753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014336094
3,640	Semantic Integration in Heterogeneous Databases Using Neural Networks	1994	VLDB	7.2327067e-05
6,436	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD	5.8793793e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,923	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD
2	3,073	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
3	6,436	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD
4	753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
5	10,399	Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations	2026	SIGMOD
6	4,515	ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB
7	9,067	Making Table Understanding Work in Practice	2022	CIDR
8	2,315	SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search	2023	SIGMOD
9	10,785	Auto-Test: Learning Semantic-Domain Constraints for Unsupervised Error Detection in Tables	2025	SIGMOD
10	8,458	RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework	2023	VLDB