{"slug": "context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent", "title": "Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget", "summary": "Researchers at arXiv propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format for context compression that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements. In experiments on multi-hop QA datasets, it outperforms matched-budget baselines by 13-20 F1 points, preserving reasoning evidence more densely than coherent summarization.", "body_md": "arXiv:2606.14875v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: We study context compression for multi-hop question answering with small language models. We propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements, preserving reasoning evidence at lower token cost. In controlled experiments on MuSiQue, TwoWiki, and HotpotQA, Telegraph English outperforms three matched-budget compression baselines (character-level deletion, truncation, and random sub-sampling) on every dataset, with gains of 13 to 20 F1 percentage point. It also outperforms a coherent prose summary produced by the same encoder on the hardest dataset. A pre-registered depth-interaction hypothesis is null: the advantage does not grow with reasoning depth within datasets. We interpret these results as evidence that readable symbolic re-expression preserves entity content more densely than either natural language or coherent summarization at matched token budget.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14875", "published_at": "2026-06-16 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-16 04:22:35.338963+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["arXiv", "MuSiQue", "TwoWiki", "HotpotQA"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/context-compression-is-not-one-thing-readable-symbolic-re-expression-vs-coherent.jsonld"}}