MINDS at SemEval-2025 Task 8: Question Answering Over Tabular Data via Large Language Model-generated SQL Queries

AbstractThe growing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened up new opportunities for answering questions based on structured data. However, LLMs often struggle to directly handle tabular data and provide accurate, grounded answers. This paper addresses the challenge of Question Answering (QA) over tabular data, specifically in the context of SemEval-2025 Task 8. We propose an LLM-based pipeline that generates SQL queries to extract answers from tabular datasets. Our system leverages In-Context Learning to produce queries, which are then executed on structured tables, to produce the final answers. We demonstrate that our solution performs effectively in a few-shot setup and scales well across tables of different sizes. Additionally, we conduct a data-driven error analysis to highlight scenarios where the model encounters difficulties. We make the code available at https://github.com/fgiobergia/SemEval2025-Task8.