Structurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation — Paper

Abstract

Graph captions should help readers understand graph structure, rather than simply translate adjacency matrices into long textual edge lists. A useful graph caption abstracts connectivity into recognizable motifs, such as hubs, paths, cycles, cliques, and bridges, because these motifs provide compact structural units that are easier to read, compare, and recover. In this paper, we study motif-oriented graph captioning as a bidirectional graph-text translation task, where captions must both preserve enough topology for graph recovery and express the graph through concise motif-level descriptions. We show that direct prompting of GPT-5.1 often produces graph-recoverable captions by enumerating node-to-node connections, but these captions are verbose and can contain inconsistent motif interpretations. To address this gap, we introduce Structurally Speaking, a lightweight structured prompting protocol that guides translation between explicit connectivity and motif-level abstraction. Experiments on a synthetic motif-based dataset show that structured prompting produces shorter and more motif-consistent captions while maintaining comparable graph recovery. These results suggest that explicit topology-to-motif reasoning guidance can make LLM-generated graph captions more interpretable without model fine-tuning.

Authors 3

Hsiao-Ying Lu, Dongyu Liu, Kwan-Liu Ma

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10923
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: new
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10923
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10923
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 1 h agohigh

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9

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T19

Freshest observation

1 h ago

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None

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Authors: Hsiao-Ying Lu, Dongyu Liu, Kwan-Liu Ma

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Claim history

10 claims · 9 properties

Official pageofficial_url1

Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10923	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Abstractabstract1

Claim history for Abstract
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Graph captions should help readers understand graph structure, rather than simply translate adjacency matrices into long textual edge lists. A useful graph caption abstracts connectivity into recognizable motifs, such as hubs, paths, cycles, cliques, and bridges, because these motifs provide compact structural units that are easier to read, compare, and recover. In this paper, we study motif-oriented graph captioning as a bidirectional graph-text translation task, where captions must both preserve enough topology for graph recovery and express the graph through concise motif-level descriptions. We show that direct prompting of GPT-5.1 often produces graph-recoverable captions by enumerating node-to-node connections, but these captions are verbose and can contain inconsistent motif interpretations. To address this gap, we introduce Structurally Speaking, a lightweight structured prompting protocol that guides translation between explicit connectivity and motif-level abstraction. Experiments on a synthetic motif-based dataset show that structured prompting produces shorter and more motif-consistent captions while maintaining comparable graph recovery. These results suggest that explicit topology-to-motif reasoning guidance can make LLM-generated graph captions more interpretable without model fine-tuning.	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Arxiv announce typearxiv_announce_type2

Claim history for Arxiv announce type
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
new	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic
cross	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → 11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC	superseded	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

arXiv idarxiv_id1

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Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
2609.10923	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Authorsauthors1

Claim history for Authors
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Hsiao-Ying Lu, Dongyu Liu, Kwan-Liu Ma	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Categoriescategories1

Claim history for Categories
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.CL, cs.LG	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

PDFpdf_url1

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10923	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Primary categoryprimary_category1

Claim history for Primary category
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
cs.CL	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Publishedpublished_at1

Claim history for Published
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
11 Sept 2026	11 Sept 2026 21:02 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
Property changedPaperStructurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation
Structurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation: arxiv announce type changed from cross to new
Arxiv announce typecross→newarxiv
rss.arxiv.org
11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperStructurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation
New paper: Structurally Speaking: Motif-Oriented Graph Captioning through Bidirectional Graph-Text Translation
arxiv
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	1 h ago	1
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.LG	feed	T1· Official	1 h ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.