Distilling structural reasoning: efficient semantic parsing via chain-of-thought rationalization and contrastive demonstration selection
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In order to use hierarchical semantic parsing, models must be able to generalize to complex, compositional logic structures in addition to comprehending natural language. Although chain-of-thought prompting has produced state-of-the-art results for large language models, two major obstacles to their deployment are structural hallucinations resulting from surface-level demonstration retrieval and prohibitive inference latency. This paper introduces a neuro-symbolic framework called distilled structural reasoning, which uses semantic fragment decoding to overcome these bottlenecks. We present three new contributions: (1) contrastive fragment selection, a retrieval mechanism trained to separate lexical noise from structural intent, allowing zero-shot schema adaptation; (2) trie-based grammar constraints, which remove syntax errors during decoding; and (3) a parser-critic feedback loop for semantic self-correction. Most importantly, we suggest a rationale distillation protocol that converts a 70B-parameter teacher's structural reasoning traces into a compact 8B-parameter student. Our framework achieves a new state-of-the-art for open-source models (87.42% exact match on TOP), outperforming standard supervised baselines and reducing inference latency by 9.4× when compared to the teacher model, according to extensive experiments on TOP, TOPv2, ATIS, and SNIPS.
Source: Scientific Reports
Author: Seyed Hossein Ahmadpanah
Institution: Islamic Azad University, Tehran
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,690
OpenAlex ID: W7162806353