Method and system for automated column type annotation

A computer implemented method for automated column type annotation, wherein the method maps each column contained in a table to a column annotation class of a set of column annotation classes, wherein each column contains a header cell and a set of body cells,

• comprising the following operations, wherein the operations are performed by components, and wherein the components are hardware components and/or software components executed by one or more processors:
• transforming, by a pre-processor, the table into a numerical tensor representation by outputting a sequence of cell tokens for each cell in the table,
• encoding, by a table encoder, the sequences of cell tokens and a column annotation label for each column into body cell embeddings, wherein at least one of the column annotation labels indicates a correct column annotation class for the respective column and at least one of the column annotation labels indicates that the column annotation class for the respective column is unknown,
• processing, by a body pooling component, the body cell embeddings to provide column representations,
• classifying, by a classifier, the column representations in order to provide for each column, confidence scores for each column annotation class,
• comparing the highest confidence score for each column with a threshold, and
• if the highest confidence score for each column is above the threshold, annotating each column with the respective column annotation class.