Tables are among the most powerful and practical tools for organizing and
working with data. Our motivation is to equip spreadsheet programs with smart
assistance capabilities. We concentrate on one particular family of tables,
namely, tables with an entity focus. We introduce and focus on two specific
tasks: populating rows with additional instances (entities) and populating
columns with new headings. We develop generative probabilistic models for both
tasks. For estimating the components of these models, we consider a knowledge
base as well as a large table corpus. Our experimental evaluation simulates the
various stages of the user entering content into an actual table. A detailed
analysis of the results shows that the models' components are complimentary and
that our methods outperform existing approaches from the literature.Comment: Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '17), 201