AI for Tabular Data Discovery and Analytics

Develops intelligent methods for discovering, completing, and querying tabular data across large-scale data lakes. This line of work covers tabular data discovery, missing value imputation, and numerical table question answering, enabling machines to locate relevant tables from heterogeneous data sources, recover incomplete data using hybrid structural and semantic signals, and answer complex numerical questions over semi-structured and multi-table settings — all under practical cost and efficiency constraints.

Research Pipeline
Input Data
Tabular Data Lakes
Structured & Semi-structured Tables
User Query & Intent
Natural Language Questions
1
Discover
Retrieves relevant tables from data lakes via query decomposition
ICDE'26
2
Complete
Imputes missing values using hybrid structural & semantic signals
VLDBJ'26
3
? ans
Reason
Understands semi-structured table and supports numerical reasoning
Under Review
Downstream Applications
📊 Business Intelligence
❓ Table Question Answering
💡 Analytical Reasoning
Central Design Objectives
💰 Monetary Cost
🎯 Answer Accuracy
📋 Data Completeness
🛡️ Budget Constraint

Related Publications

ICDE 2026
Decomposition-Driven Multi-Table Retrieval and Reasoning for Numerical Question Answering
Feng Luo, Hai Lan, Hui Luo, Zhifeng Bao, Xiaoli Wang, J. Shane Culpepper, Shazia Sadiq
IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2026
VLDB J. 2026
Missing Value Imputation in Tabular Data Lakes Unleashed: A Hybrid Approach
Feng Luo, Hai Lan, Hui Luo, Zhifeng Bao, J. Shane Culpepper, Shazia Sadiq, Xiaoli Wang
The VLDB Journal, 2026