  Many information needs revolve around entities, which would be better
answered by summarizing results in a tabular format, rather than presenting
them as a ranked list. Unlike previous work, which is limited to retrieving
existing tables, we aim to answer queries by automatically compiling a table in
response to a query. We introduce and address the task of on-the-fly table
generation: given a query, generate a relational table that contains relevant
entities (as rows) along with their key properties (as columns). This problem
is decomposed into three specific subtasks: (i) core column entity ranking,
(ii) schema determination, and (iii) value lookup. We employ a feature-based
approach for entity ranking and schema determination, combining deep semantic
features with task-specific signals. We further show that these two subtasks
are not independent of each other and can assist each other in an iterative
manner. For value lookup, we combine information from existing tables and a
knowledge base. Using two sets of entity-oriented queries, we evaluate our
approach both on the component level and on the end-to-end table generation
task.
