# Semantic Anchoring in Agentic Memory: Leveraging Linguistic Structures for Persistent Conversational Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12630/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 11 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent memory systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-memory-systems/)

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

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Deep Biaffine Attention for Neural Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01734/) (2016)
- [Experience Grounds Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10151/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Neural Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07045/) (2017)
- [Memorizing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08913/) (2022)
- [Conversational AI: The Science Behind the Alexa Prize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03604/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [APEX-MEM: Agentic Semi-Structured Memory with Temporal Reasoning for Long-Term Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14362/) (2026)
- [Learning to Share: Selective Memory for Efficient Parallel Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05965/) (2026)
- [AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14674/) (2026)
- [Towards Root Memories: Benchmarking and Enhancing Implicit Logical Memory Retrieval for Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23283/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive fluency and task competence in conversational settings. However, their effectiveness in multi-session and long-term interactions is hindered by limited memory persistence. Typical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems store dialogue history as dense vectors, which capture semantic similarity but neglect finer linguistic structures such as syntactic dependencies, discourse relations, and coreference links. We propose Semantic Anchoring, a hybrid agentic memory architecture that enriches vector-based storage with explicit linguistic cues to improve recall of nuanced, context-rich exchanges. Our approach combines dependency parsing, discourse relation tagging, and coreference resolution to create structured memory entries. Experiments on adapted long-term dialogue datasets show that semantic anchoring improves factual recall and discourse coherence by up to 18% over strong RAG baselines. We further conduct ablation studies, human evaluations, and error analysis to assess robustness and interpretability.