Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy

Kaize Shi, Xueyao Sun, Xiaohui Tao, Lin Li, Qika Lin, Guandong Xu


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) face information overload when handling long contexts, particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where extensive supporting documents introduce redundant content that interferes with reasoning. Context engineering has emerged to address these challenges, yet existing methods rely on lexical or token-level features that fragment semantic units and fail to capture conceptually essential content. We propose an unsupervised context compression framework leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to preserve semantically essential information while filtering irrelevant text. By quantifying node-level entropy within AMR graphs, our method estimates the conceptual importance of each node, enabling retention of core semantics. Specifically, we construct AMR graphs from retrieved contexts, compute the conceptual entropy of each node, and identify statistically significant concepts to form a condensed, semantically focused context. Experiments on the PopQA and EntityQuestions datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms vanilla RAG and existing baselines, achieving superior accuracy while substantially reducing context length. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work introducing AMR-based conceptual entropy for context compression, demonstrating the potential of structured linguistic representations in context engineering.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.590
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
12158–12173
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.590/
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Cite (ACL):
Kaize Shi, Xueyao Sun, Xiaohui Tao, Lin Li, Qika Lin, and Guandong Xu. 2026. Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 12158–12173, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy (Shi et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.590.pdf
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