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TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning

Summary: TURL pre-trains a structure-aware Transformer over Web tables using Masked Entity Recovery, learning contextual row-column representations. One universal model transfers via lightweight fine-tuning across six table-understanding tasks, outperforming heavily engineered task-specific methods. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
12701
Venue
VLDB
Year
2021
Pagerank
0.00019278189
Overall Rank
397 | 97.28%
DOI
10.14778/3430915.3430921

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{deng_vldb21,
        title = {{TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning}},
        author = {Deng, Xiang and Sun, Huan and Lees, Alyssa and Wu, You and Yu, Cong},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {3},
        pages = {307--319},
        doi = {10.14778/3430915.3430921},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3430915.3430921},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 56 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
420 Can Foundation Models Wrangle Your Data? 2023 VLDB 0.00018789852
1,923 Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models 2022 SIGMOD 9.4789109e-05
2,019 RPT: Relational Pre-trained Transformer Is Almost All You Need towards Democratizing Data Preparation 2021 VLDB 9.2983994e-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
2,790 GitTables: A Large-Scale Corpus of Relational Tables 2023 SIGMOD 8.1200509e-05
3,073 DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models 2023 VLDB 7.785842e-05
3,436 Unicorn: A Unified Multi-tasking Model for Supporting Matching Tasks in Data Integration 2023 SIGMOD 7.4157897e-05
3,536 How Large Language Models Will Disrupt Data Management 2023 VLDB 7.3297343e-05
4,045 Logical and Physical Optimizations for SQL Query Execution over Large Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 6.9394654e-05
4,123 Integrating Data Lake Tables 2023 VLDB 6.8878137e-05
4,515 ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models 2024 VLDB 6.6492389e-05
4,671 PreQR: Pre-training Representation for SQL Understanding 2022 SIGMOD 6.5732787e-05
4,735 Leva: Boosting Machine Learning Performance with Relational Embedding Data Augmentation 2022 SIGMOD 6.5315782e-05
4,836 Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Tutorial on Models and Applications 2022 VLDB 6.4848269e-05
5,403 Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples 2023 VLDB 6.2306083e-05
5,518 Self-supervised and Interpretable Data Cleaning with Sequence Generative Adversarial Networks 2023 VLDB 6.1885722e-05
5,816 Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables 2024 VLDB 6.0776454e-05
6,357 A Unified Transferable Model for ML-Enhanced DBMS 2022 CIDR 5.9020843e-05
6,545 DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models 2024 SIGMOD 5.8454882e-05
7,572 Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes 2023 VLDB 5.5938952e-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
8,854 Towards Foundation Database Models 2025 CIDR 5.357608e-05
8,855 ANN Softmax: Acceleration of Extreme Classification Training 2022 VLDB 5.3573227e-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
8,914 CtxPipe: Context-aware Data Preparation Pipeline Construction for Machine Learning 2024 SIGMOD 5.3483178e-05
9,067 Making Table Understanding Work in Practice 2022 CIDR 5.3251649e-05
9,177 VerifAI: Verified Generative AI 2024 CIDR 5.3078984e-05
9,437 GIDCL: A Graph-Enhanced Interpretable Data Cleaning Framework with Large Language Models 2024 SIGMOD 5.2687567e-05
9,505 TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations 2025 VLDB 5.258497e-05
9,550 Data Imputation with Limited Data Redundancy Using Data Lakes 2025 VLDB 5.2528121e-05
9,930 Data Augmentation for ML-driven Data Preparation and Integration 2021 VLDB 5.1955087e-05
9,972 Cents: A Flexible and Cost-Effective Framework for LLM-Based Table Understanding 2025 VLDB 5.1845938e-05
10,109 QueryArtisan: Generating Data Manipulation Codes for Ad-hoc Analysis in Data Lakes 2025 VLDB 5.1347137e-05
10,231 CONE: Embeddings for Complex Numerical Data Preserving Unit and Variable Semantics 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,351 Burr: A Benchmark for Ontology Learning from Relational Databases 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-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
10,486 Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,556 OpenSQL: Data-Efficient Text-to-SQL for Open-Source LLMs via Synthesized Intermediate Supervision 2026 VLDB 5.093636e-05
10,774 PLM4NDV: Minimizing Data Access for Number of Distinct Values Estimation with Pre-trained Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,783 Table Overlap Estimation through Graph Embeddings 2025 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,850 Birdie: Natural Language-Driven Table Discovery Using Differentiable Search Index 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
10,987 OmniMatch: Joinability Discovery in Data Products 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,068 Panel on Neural Relational Data: Tabular Foundation Models, LLMs... or both? 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,167 Determining the Largest Overlap between Tables 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 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
141 Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models 2021 VLDB 0.0002964847
317 Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships 2010 VLDB 0.00021402049
367 InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables 2012 SIGMOD 0.00019979463
739 Finding Related Tables 2012 SIGMOD 0.0001448231
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

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# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 1,055 Answering Table Queries on the Web using Column Keywords 2012 VLDB
2 5,816 Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables 2024 VLDB
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4 753 Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web 2011 VLDB
5 2,790 GitTables: A Large-Scale Corpus of Relational Tables 2023 SIGMOD
6 1,684 Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract] 2009 VLDB
7 9,067 Making Table Understanding Work in Practice 2022 CIDR
8 317 Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships 2010 VLDB
9 10,399 Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations 2026 SIGMOD
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