Lingua-Graph: A Unified Representation of Cross-Task Common Substructures for Analytic Language Processing

Mingming Sun, Runze Jiang, Zhu Zhangchenxi, Minlong Peng, Yunfeng Cai


Abstract
Structural understanding of natural language requires explicit recovery of internal meaning structures (entities, facts, nested relations), yet current structural-analytic tasks are fragmented by inconsistent task requirements across datasets. We investigate the problem of robust cross-task structural understanding under heterogeneous requirements across structural-analytic tasks and outline a perspective called Analytic NLP in which tasks can be reformulated into a representation-then-decision paradigm. In this paper, we suggest a solution for the representation layer, called Lingua-Graph, which explicitly captures entities, facts, and relations. By representing predictions as explicit graphs with labeled nodes and edges, Lingua-Graph also improves interpretability, enabling transparent inspection and error analysis of intermediate meaning structures. We construct a labeled Lingua-Graph dataset and train a baseline parser. Experiments show that Lingua-Graph provides substantially higher entity-structure hostability than alternative representations on average, and OpenIE systems based on Lingua-Graph achieve superior performance on three benchmarks, demonstrating that better intermediate structures translate into downstream gains. The data, code and the trained model are publicly released at https://github.com/rudaoshi/Lingua.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1129
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
24630–24646
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1129/
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Cite (ACL):
Mingming Sun, Runze Jiang, Zhu Zhangchenxi, Minlong Peng, and Yunfeng Cai. 2026. Lingua-Graph: A Unified Representation of Cross-Task Common Substructures for Analytic Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24630–24646, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lingua-Graph: A Unified Representation of Cross-Task Common Substructures for Analytic Language Processing (Sun et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1129.pdf
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