Tables are widely used for data storage and presentation due to their high flexibility in layout. The importance of tables as information carriers and the complexity of tabular data understanding attract a great deal of research on large-scale pre-training for tabular data. However, most of the works design models for specific types of tables, such as relational tables and tables with well-structured headers, neglecting tables with complex layouts. In real-world scenarios, there are many such tables beyond their target scope that cannot be well supported. In this paper, we propose GetPt, a unified pre-training architecture for general table representation applicable even to tables with complex structures and layouts. First, we convert a table to a heterogeneous graph with multiple types of edges to represent the layout of the table. Based on the graph, a specially designed transformer is applied to jointly model the semantics and structure of the table. Second, we devise the Alternate Attention Network (AAN) to better model the contextual information across multiple granularities of a table including tokens, cells, and the table. To better support a wide range of downstream tasks, we further employ three pre-training objectives and pre-train the model on a large table dataset. We fine-tune and evaluate GetPt model on two representative tasks, table type classification, and table structure recognition. Experiments show that GetPt outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on these tasks.

There are increasing interests in document layout representation learning and understanding. Transformer, with its great power, has become the mainstream model architecture and achieved promising results in this area. As elements in a document layout consist of multi-modal and multi-dimensional features such as position, size, and its text content, prior works represent each element by summing all feature embeddings into one unified vector in the input layer, which is then fed into the self-attention for element-wise interaction. However, this simple summation would potentially raise mixed correlations among heterogeneous features and bring noise to the representation learning. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step disentangled attention mechanism to allow more flexible feature interactions in the self-attention. Furthermore, inspired by the principles of document design (e.g., contrast, proximity), we propose an unsupervised learning objective to constrain the layout representations. We verify our approach on two layout understanding tasks, namely element role labeling and image captioning. Experiment results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances. Moreover, we conduct extensive studies and observe better interpretability using our approach.

An appropriate set of indexes can result in orders of magnitude better query performance. Index management is a challenging task even for expert human administrators. Fully automating this process is of significant value. We describe the challenges, architecture, design choices, implementation, and learnings from building an industrial-strength auto-indexing service for Microsoft Azure SQL Database, a relational database service. Our service has been generally available for more than two years, generating index recommendations for every database in Azure SQL Database, automatically implementing them for a large fraction, and significantly improving performance of hundreds of thousands of databases. We also share our experience from experimentation at scale with production databases which gives us confidence in our index recommendation quality for complex real applications.