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: h3473bde9119fb014
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 9.0593586e-05
Overall Rank: 2,093 | 85.94%
DOI: 10.14778/3407790.3407793
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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 26 of 26 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,669	SystemDS: A Declarative Machine Learning System for the End-to-End Data Science Lifecycle	2020	CIDR	9.9324573e-05
1,778	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD	9.6578031e-05
1,854	Semantics-aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-based Representation Learning	2023	VLDB	9.4961138e-05
1,929	CHORUS: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and Exploration	2024	VLDB	9.3551286e-05
1,977	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.2760522e-05
1,990	SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search	2023	SIGMOD	9.2443028e-05
2,378	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB	8.5495442e-05
3,236	How Large Language Models Will Disrupt Data Management	2023	VLDB	7.4996147e-05
4,411	LakeBench: A Benchmark for Discovering Joinable and Unionable Tables in Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	6.6089506e-05
4,426	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.601896e-05
4,591	ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB	6.5113872e-05
5,078	Rotom: A Meta-Learned Data Augmentation Framework for Entity Matching, Data Cleaning, Text Classification, and Beyond	2021	SIGMOD	6.2832055e-05
5,279	MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction	2022	VLDB	6.1973533e-05
5,322	Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables	2024	VLDB	6.1809951e-05
7,164	WarpGate: A Semantic Join Discovery System for Cloud Data Warehouses	2023	CIDR	5.5934028e-05
7,199	Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes	2023	VLDB	5.5864204e-05
7,742	Auto-Validate: Unsupervised Data Validation Using Data-Domain Patterns Inferred from Data Lakes	2021	SIGMOD	5.4599258e-05
8,601	RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework	2023	VLDB	5.3038325e-05
8,997	Watchog: A Light-weight Contrastive Learning based Framework for Column Annotation	2023	SIGMOD	5.2400249e-05
9,078	Unveiling Challenges for LLMs in Enterprise Data Engineering	2026	VLDB	5.2258409e-05
9,545	GIO: Generating Efficient Matrix and Frame Readers for Custom Data Formats by Example	2023	SIGMOD	5.1600923e-05
10,169	Cents: A Flexible and Cost-Effective Framework for LLM-Based Table Understanding	2025	VLDB	5.0658661e-05
10,606	Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,631	AutoDDG: Automated Dataset Description Generation using Large Language Models	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,047	Semantic Data Systems: From Data Management to Data Understanding	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,726	Steered Training Data Generation for Learned Semantic Type Detection	2023	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-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	0.00038204552
89	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00035115118
95	Potter's Wheel: An Interactive Data Cleaning System	2001	VLDB	0.00034367518
316	Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships	2010	VLDB	0.00021212425
757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB	0.00014199305
3,695	Semantic Integration in Heterogeneous Databases Using Neural Networks	1994	VLDB	7.0901828e-05
6,490	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD	5.7653145e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,778	Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models	2022	SIGMOD
2	2,378	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
3	6,490	Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types using Open-source Code	2018	SIGMOD
4	757	Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web	2011	VLDB
5	10,606	Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations	2026	SIGMOD
6	4,591	ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB
7	9,254	Making Table Understanding Work in Practice	2022	CIDR
8	1,990	SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search	2023	SIGMOD
9	9,239	Auto-Test: Learning Semantic-Domain Constraints for Unsupervised Error Detection in Tables	2025	SIGMOD
10	8,601	RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework	2023	VLDB