StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) over structured data in a unified way. Inspired by the studies on tool augmentation for LLMs, we develop an Iterative Reading-then-Reasoning (IRR) framework to solve question answering tasks based on structured data, called StructGPT. In this framework, we construct the specialized interfaces to collect relevant evidence from structured data (i.e., reading), and let LLMs concentrate on the reasoning task based on the collected information (i.e., reasoning). Specially, we propose an invoking-linearization-generation procedure to support LLMs in reasoning on the structured data with the help of the interfaces. By iterating this procedure with provided interfaces, our approach can gradually approach the target answers to a given query. Experiments conducted on three types of structured data show that StructGPT greatly improves the performance of LLMs, under the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/StructGPT.