  This paper addresses the problem of generating table captions for scholarly
documents, which often require additional information outside the table. To
this end, we propose a method of retrieving relevant sentences from the paper
body, and feeding the table content as well as the retrieved sentences into
pre-trained language models (e.g. T5 and GPT-2) for generating table captions.
The contributions of this paper are: (1) discussion on the challenges in table
captioning for scholarly documents; (2) development of a dataset DocBank-TB,
which is publicly available; and (3) comparison of caption generation methods
for scholarly documents with different strategies to retrieve relevant
sentences from the paper body. Our experimental results showed that T5 is the
better generation model for this task, as it outperformed GPT-2 in BLEU and
METEOR implying that the generated text are clearer and more precise. Moreover,
inputting relevant sentences matching the row header or whole table is
effective.
