Structure Shapes the Future of DataxLLM Systems: Retrieval, Structuring, and Reasoning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI, yet they remain fundamentally limited by hallucination, unverifiable reasoning, and shallow evidence grounding. We argue that structure mining-rooted in decades of KDD research on taxonomy induction, ontology design, entity typing, and knowledge graph construction-is the key to overcoming these limitations. This tutorial presents a unified vision in which structuring serves as the enabling foundation for three pillars of next-generation LLM systems: (1) Structured Retrieval, where organizing corpora into ontology-guided multidimensional representations enables SQL-like queries that achieve substantially more precise and complete retrieval than similarity-based approaches; (2) Structured Reasoning, where grounding each inference step in typed, graph-structured evidence transforms opaque generation into auditable, verifiable reasoning chains; and (3) Structured Agent Memory, where multi-dimensional memory architectures bridge external corpus knowledge and experiential agent knowledge through a mutually enriching dual-memory design. Across all three pillars, we highlight how the cooperative interplay between classical KDD techniques and modern LLMs-where KDD defines structural schemas and quality constraints while LLMs execute flexible extraction and reasoning-creates systems that are more reliable, interpretable, and faithful. The tutorial covers both foundational methods and the latest advances (2024--2026), and concludes with open problems and future research directions at the intersection of data mining and LLMs.