AW

Dataset Summary

AW is a dataset for keyword search over tables (KWS-over-tables): given a short natural-language keyword query (e.g., "employee phone number"), a retrieval system must rank the tables in a corpus by their relevance to the query. The task is the table analog of text retrieval — instead of returning documents, the system returns structured tables — and is motivated by enterprise data discovery, where analysts who know roughly what they need must locate the right table in a database with many cryptically named ones.

The corpus is a modified version of the AdventureWorks Microsoft sample database. Column names have been manually abbreviated (e.g., BusEntId, DTPh, STRGUID) to simulate the low-information schemas common in real enterprise data.

Relevance judgments are binary (0 or 1) and were produced by manual inspection of every (query, table) pair in the full 96 × 15 = 1,440 Cartesian product. The 60 pairs marked relevant (1) are listed in qrels.csv; pairs not listed are non-relevant.

AW is one of six datasets in an evaluation suite for this task; each dataset is published as its own Hugging Face repo following the same schema.

How to Use

AW is an evaluation-only benchmark — there is no train/test split. All rows live in a single split named all. (Hugging Face's datasets library requires every config to declare a split; all is used here in place of the default train label to avoid implying training data.)

from datasets import load_dataset

# Tables, queries, and binary relevance judgments
metadata = load_dataset("anhaidgroup/aw", "metadata", split="all")  # 96 tables
queries  = load_dataset("anhaidgroup/aw", "queries",  split="all")  # 15 queries
qrels    = load_dataset("anhaidgroup/aw", "qrels",    split="all")  # 60 relevant pairs

For methods that consume tuple-level data, download the per-table tuples archive separately:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import zipfile, pandas as pd

zip_path = hf_hub_download("anhaidgroup/aw", "tuples.zip", repo_type="dataset")
with zipfile.ZipFile(zip_path) as z:
    with z.open("Tuples/Sales-17.csv") as f:
        df = pd.read_csv(f)

Methods that retrieve over table metadata (table name and column names) only need metadata, queries, and qrels. Methods that retrieve over actual tuple values additionally need tuples.zip.

Dataset Structure

Files

file	size	purpose
metadata.csv	96 rows	one row per table; identifier, name, column names
queries.csv	15 rows	one row per query; identifier and query text
qrels.csv	60 rows	binary relevance judgments (positive pairs only)
tuples.zip	96 inner CSVs	per-table tuple data, one CSV per table

Schema

metadata.csv

column	type	description
table_id	str	unique identifier, e.g., Person-0, Sales-17
table_name	str	name from the source schema
column_names	str	JSON-encoded list of column names; parse with json.loads

queries.csv

column	type	description
query_id	str	unique identifier, e.g., q1, q2
query	str	natural-language keyword query

qrels.csv — positive-only convention: only relevant (query, table) pairs are listed. Pairs not listed are treated as non-relevant.

column	type	description
query_id	str	foreign key to queries.csv
table_id	str	foreign key to metadata.csv
relevance_score	int	always 1 (binary judgments)

tuples.zip — archive of per-table CSV files.

• Inner layout: Tuples/<table_id>.csv (one file per table).
• Each inner CSV: header on row 0 (matching the column_names entry in metadata.csv for that table_id), tuples on subsequent rows, RFC 4180 quoting.
• Some tables (e.g., Production-2) contain multi-line quoted text fields. Use a CSV parser that respects quoting (pandas.read_csv works); avoid line-based tools.

Statistics

96 tables span six namespaces from the source schema: Person (13), Sales (19), dbo (28), Production (25), Purchasing (5), HumanResources (6). Per-query relevant-table counts range from 1 to 8 (median 4).

Dataset Creation

Source Data

The corpus is built from a modified version of AdventureWorks, Microsoft's sample relational database for SQL Server demos. The schema modification is the manual abbreviation of column names — tuple values are unchanged from the original. This modified schema was originally introduced in the Columbo system to study retrieval and discovery on schemas with low-information names.

Annotations

All 1,440 candidate (query, table) pairs (96 tables × 15 queries) were manually inspected. A pair was marked relevant (1) if the table contains data that would satisfy the query, judged from the table name, column names, and a sample of tuple values. Pairs not marked are non-relevant. The positive-only convention (60 entries listed in qrels.csv, the rest treated as non-relevant by absence) follows TREC qrels practice.

Considerations for Using the Data

Tuple downsampling

This release caps each table's tuples at 500,000 rows, applied as df.head(500_000) against the source — the first 500k rows of each table preserving the original ordering. Tables with fewer than 500k rows are unaffected.

metadata.csv and qrels.csv were produced against the un-capped corpus. Methods that rely only on table metadata (table name and column names) are unaffected by the cap. Methods that inspect actual tuple values may produce a deflated score relative to the same method evaluated on the un-capped corpus, since some relevant cells in tail rows of large tables may not appear in tuples.zip. A future release will include the un-capped tuples.

License

The dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0. You are free to share and adapt the material with attribution.

The source AdventureWorks database is a Microsoft sample.

Citation

A citation will be added once the associated paper is published.

Authors

Minh Phan, Ting Cai, AnHai Doan.