ExQuisiTe: Explaining Quantities in Text

Yusra Ibrahim, Gerhard Weikum

Abstract: Web pages and other documents often contain tables to provide numerical details in a structured manner. Typically, the text explains and highlights important quantities, often using approximate numbers and aggregates such as totals, averages or ratios. For a human reader, it is crucial to navigate between text and tables to understand the key information in its context, drill down into tables when details are needed, and obtain explanations on specific figures from the accompanying text. In this demo, we present ExQuisiTe: a system to align quantity mentions in the text with related quantity mentions in tables, and enable extractive summarization that considers table contents. ExQuisiTe links quantity mentions in the text with quantities in tables, to support user-friendly exploration. ExQuisiTe handles exact single-cell references as well as rounded or truncated numbers and aggregations such as row or column totals.