Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget
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 advan...
| Authors | Sisong Bei, Mikhail L. Arbuzov, Ziwei Dong et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 June 2026 |
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