# PASemiQA: Plan-Assisted Agent for Question Answering on Semi-Structured Data with Text and Relational Information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 11 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12570/) (2023)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Knowledge: Grounding Large Language Models via Dynamic Knowledge Adapting over Heterogeneous Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13269/) (2023)
- [Generate-on-Graph: Treat LLM as both Agent and KG in Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14741/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Autofocus Retrieval: An Effective Pipeline for Multi-Hop Question Answering With Semi-Structured Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09246/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graphs as Files: An Agent Harness Where Tool Creation and Tool Use Co-Evolve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in answering questions across various domains, but they often encounter hallucination issues on questions that require professional and up-to-date knowledge. To address this limitation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have been proposed, which retrieve relevant information from external sources to inform their responses. However, existing RAG methods typically focus on a single type of external data, such as vectorized text database or knowledge graphs, and cannot well handle real-world questions on semi-structured data containing both text and relational information. To bridge this gap, we introduce PASemiQA, a novel approach that jointly leverages text and relational information in semi-structured data to answer questions. PASemiQA first generates a plan to identify relevant text and relational information to answer the question in semi-structured data, and then uses an LLM agent to traverse the semi-structured data and extract necessary information. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of PASemiQA across different semi-structured datasets from various domains, showcasing its potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of question answering systems on semi-structured data.