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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
h68d78689ddbe033a
Venue
VLDB
Year
2021
Pagerank
0.00019570264
Overall Rank
377 | 97.47%
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 58 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
329 Can Foundation Models Wrangle Your Data? 2023 VLDB 0.00020858443
1,780 Annotating Columns with Pre-trained Language Models 2022 SIGMOD 9.6560923e-05
1,852 Semantics-aware Dataset Discovery from Data Lakes with Contextualized Column-based Representation Learning 2023 VLDB 9.5004635e-05
1,932 CHORUS: Foundation Models for Unified Data Discovery and Exploration 2024 VLDB 9.34643e-05
1,978 Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks 2024 SIGMOD 9.2730152e-05
1,988 SANTOS: Relationship-based Semantic Table Union Search 2023 SIGMOD 9.2482448e-05
1,991 RPT: Relational Pre-trained Transformer Is Almost All You Need towards Democratizing Data Preparation 2021 VLDB 9.2383849e-05
2,382 DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models 2023 VLDB 8.5458532e-05
2,521 GitTables: A Large-Scale Corpus of Relational Tables 2023 SIGMOD 8.3479333e-05
3,250 How Large Language Models Will Disrupt Data Management 2023 VLDB 7.4938546e-05
3,473 Unicorn: A Unified Multi-tasking Model for Supporting Matching Tasks in Data Integration 2023 SIGMOD 7.2728706e-05
3,617 Leva: Boosting Machine Learning Performance with Relational Embedding Data Augmentation 2022 SIGMOD 7.1574349e-05
3,743 Logical and Physical Optimizations for SQL Query Execution over Large Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 7.0586112e-05
4,159 Integrating Data Lake Tables 2023 VLDB 6.7717519e-05
4,589 ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models 2024 VLDB 6.5144711e-05
4,630 Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Tutorial on Models and Applications 2022 VLDB 6.4953891e-05
4,707 PreQR: Pre-training Representation for SQL Understanding 2022 SIGMOD 6.4587914e-05
5,167 Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples 2023 VLDB 6.2462501e-05
5,332 Observatory: Characterizing Embeddings of Relational Tables 2024 VLDB 6.1766186e-05
5,643 Self-supervised and Interpretable Data Cleaning with Sequence Generative Adversarial Networks 2023 VLDB 6.0538129e-05
5,687 DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models 2024 SIGMOD 6.0360406e-05
6,416 A Unified Transferable Model for ML-Enhanced DBMS 2022 CIDR 5.7920805e-05
6,921 CtxPipe: Context-aware Data Preparation Pipeline Construction for Machine Learning 2024 SIGMOD 5.6432616e-05
7,161 WarpGate: A Semantic Join Discovery System for Cloud Data Warehouses 2023 CIDR 5.596048e-05
7,197 Cross Modal Data Discovery over Structured and Unstructured Data Lakes 2023 VLDB 5.5890662e-05
7,385 Towards Foundation Database Models 2025 CIDR 5.5385053e-05
7,583 Data Imputation with Limited Data Redundancy Using Data Lakes 2025 VLDB 5.4906208e-05
7,928 TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations 2025 VLDB 5.4254488e-05
8,574 OmniMatch: Joinability Discovery in Data Products 2025 VLDB 5.312217e-05
8,594 RECA: Related Tables Enhanced Column Semantic Type Annotation Framework 2023 VLDB 5.3063445e-05
8,988 Watchog: A Light-weight Contrastive Learning based Framework for Column Annotation 2023 SIGMOD 5.2425067e-05
8,998 ANN Softmax: Acceleration of Extreme Classification Training 2022 VLDB 5.2400492e-05
9,069 Unveiling Challenges for LLMs in Enterprise Data Engineering 2026 VLDB 5.2283159e-05
9,244 Making Table Understanding Work in Practice 2022 CIDR 5.2056825e-05
9,311 VerifAI: Verified Generative AI 2024 CIDR 5.1965878e-05
9,616 GIDCL: A Graph-Enhanced Interpretable Data Cleaning Framework with Large Language Models 2024 SIGMOD 5.1510548e-05
10,112 Data Augmentation for ML-driven Data Preparation and Integration 2021 VLDB 5.0789354e-05
10,165 Cents: A Flexible and Cost-Effective Framework for LLM-Based Table Understanding 2025 VLDB 5.0682654e-05
10,337 QueryArtisan: Generating Data Manipulation Codes for Ad-hoc Analysis in Data Lakes 2025 VLDB 5.0200193e-05
10,447 CONE: Embeddings for Complex Numerical Data Preserving Unit and Variable Semantics 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,552 Burr: A Benchmark for Ontology Learning from Relational Databases 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,595 Retrieve-and-Verify: A Table Context Selection Framework for Accurate Column Annotations 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,620 AutoDDG: Automated Dataset Description Generation using Large Language Models 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,673 Qualitative Join Discovery in Data Lakes using Examples 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,738 OpenSQL: Data-Efficient Text-to-SQL for Open-Source LLMs via Synthesized Intermediate Supervision 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
10,816 FedAugment: Table Augmentation Search over Decentralized Data Repositories 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,038 Semantic Data Systems: From Data Management to Data Understanding 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,192 PLM4NDV: Minimizing Data Access for Number of Distinct Values Estimation with Pre-trained Language Models 2025 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
11,200 Table Overlap Estimation through Graph Embeddings 2025 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
11,256 Birdie: Natural Language-Driven Table Discovery Using Differentiable Search Index 2025 VLDB 4.9793485e-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
89 WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web 2008 VLDB 0.00035129658
134 Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models 2021 VLDB 0.00030043481
316 Annotating and Searching Web Tables Using Entities, Types and Relationships 2010 VLDB 0.00021221602
367 InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables 2012 SIGMOD 0.00019884846
717 Finding Related Tables 2012 SIGMOD 0.00014532116
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

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# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
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