Pytheas: Pattern-based Table Discovery in CSV Files

Summary: Pytheas uses pattern-based line classification and column-value coherency to discover tables in loosely structured CSVs. It achieves precision/recall above 95% (vs ~89/81), generalizes across countries, and provides a confidence measure for potential errors. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12288
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 6.8570481e-05
Overall Rank: 4,168 | 71.41%
DOI: 10.14778/3407790.3407810

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christina Christodoulakis (University of Toronto)
2. Eric B. Munson (University of Toronto)
3. Moshe Gabel (University of Toronto)
4. Angela Demke Brown (University of Toronto)
5. Renée J. Miller (Northeastern University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{christodoulakis_vldb20,
        title = {{Pytheas: Pattern-based Table Discovery in CSV Files}},
        author = {Christodoulakis, Christina and Munson, Eric B. and Gabel, Moshe and Brown, Angela Demke and Miller, Renée J.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '20},
        volume = {13},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2075--2089},
        doi = {10.14778/3407790.3407810},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3407790.3407810},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,167	Mondrian: Spreadsheet Layout Detection	2022	SIGMOD	5.6841406e-05
7,803	Pollock: A Data Loading Benchmark	2023	VLDB	5.5418222e-05
8,397	A Demonstration of KGLac: A Data Discovery and Enrichment Platform for Data Science	2021	VLDB	5.4344976e-05
11,618	Detecting Layout Templates in Complex Multiregion Files	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00034838835
367	InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00019979463
493	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017558709
878	Table Union Search on Open Data	2018	VLDB	0.00013463374
1,055	Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords	2012	VLDB	0.00012389274
1,316	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00011181216
1,495	LSH Ensemble: Internet-Scale Domain Search	2016	VLDB	0.00010571481
2,216	Open Data Integration	2018	VLDB	8.9374127e-05
2,415	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB	8.6069635e-05
3,074	Speculative Distributed CSV Data Parsing for Big Data Analytics	2019	SIGMOD	7.7844208e-05
3,181	InfoGather+: Semantic Matching and Annotation of Numeric and Time-Varying Attributes in Web Tables	2013	SIGMOD	7.6595256e-05
3,574	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.2958137e-05
7,015	A framework for annotating CSV-like data	2016	VLDB	5.7257102e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	753	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
2	5,125	Data-Driven Domain Discovery for Structured Datasets	2020	VLDB
3	739	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD
4	7,482	Table Extraction and Understanding for Scientific and Enterprise Applications	2020	VLDB
5	9,067	Making Table Understanding Work in Practice	2022	CIDR
6	1,316	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB
7	10,399	Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations	2026	SIGMOD
8	2,415	Schema Extraction for Tabular Data on the Web	2013	VLDB
9	11,546	Pythia: Unsupervised Generation of Ambiguous Textual Claims from Relational Data	2022	SIGMOD
10	7,015	A framework for annotating CSV-like data	2016	VLDB