# Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation for Agentic AI with a Universal Evaluation Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12257 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12257/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 98 of its 156 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)
- [MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03302/) (2023)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00539/) (2023)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13867/) (2023)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09136/) (2025)
- [DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06127/) (2019)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04398/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17617/) (2023)
- [InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08085/) (2023)
- [Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/) (2022)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02871/) (2020)
- [ChartX & ChartVLM: A Versatile Benchmark and Foundation Model for Complicated Chart Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12185/) (2024)

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

- [AMUSE: Audio-Visual Benchmark and Alignment Framework for Agentic Multi-Speaker Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16250/) (2025)
- [MultivationBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Sequential Motivation Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26465/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The evolution of AI systems toward agentic operation and context-aware retrieval necessitates transforming unstructured text into structured formats like tables, knowledge graphs, and charts. While such conversions enable critical applications from summarization to data mining, current research lacks a comprehensive synthesis of methodologies, datasets, and metrics. This systematic review examines text-to-structure techniques and the encountered challenges, evaluates current datasets and assessment criteria, and outlines potential directions for future research. We also introduce a universal evaluation framework for structured outputs, establishing text-to-structure as foundational infrastructure for next-generation AI systems.
