@inproceedings{zou-etal-2026-tether,
title = "{TETHER}: Training-Free, Elastic, {T}o{C}-Anchored Hierarchy Extraction and Recovery in Design-Driven Long Documents",
author = "Zou, Yu and
Chen, Yan and
Zeng, Jialei and
Zhou, Xiaorui and
Zhong, Aixi and
Zhou, Qi and
You, Haoran and
Jiang, Ke and
Hu, Changyu",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2354/",
pages = "53469--53479",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Converting complex documents into structured knowledge constitutes the critical infrastructure urgently required for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in downstream research. However, blind to the Table of Contents (ToC) as a macro-structure, existing bottom-up paradigms rely on localized visual cues, inducing heuristic fragility in high-entropy layouts where visual prominence decouples from logical depth; meanwhile, direct LLM extraction lacks spatial grounding, triggering hallucinations in long contexts. To address this, we introduce TETHER, a training-free framework that elevates the ToC from discarded noise to a vital structural prior, enabling robust adaptation across design-driven long documents. TETHER operates via a two-stage neuro-symbolic mechanism: first, it constructs a document skeleton from the raw ToC using a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) empowered by spatio-semantic constraints; second, it employs an anchor-based alignment strategy to tether content blocks to this skeleton, effectively resolving boundary ambiguities. Evaluated across a multilingual benchmark of ESG reports, product manuals, and annual reports, TETHER delivers highly precise, state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot hierarchy recovery, outperforming deep hierarchical recovery models, dedicated parsers, and general-purpose LMMs. Moreover, stress tests highlight TETHER{'}s resilience to sparse omissions and textual noise, demonstrating that its precise semantic alignment is fundamentally anchored in topological and depth fidelity. Crucially, ablations confirm the framework{'}s architectural irreducibility, while achieving 90{\%} token reduction and drastic speedups over end-to-end baselines, establishing a compelling equilibrium between structural precision and deployment scalability."
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<abstract>Converting complex documents into structured knowledge constitutes the critical infrastructure urgently required for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in downstream research. However, blind to the Table of Contents (ToC) as a macro-structure, existing bottom-up paradigms rely on localized visual cues, inducing heuristic fragility in high-entropy layouts where visual prominence decouples from logical depth; meanwhile, direct LLM extraction lacks spatial grounding, triggering hallucinations in long contexts. To address this, we introduce TETHER, a training-free framework that elevates the ToC from discarded noise to a vital structural prior, enabling robust adaptation across design-driven long documents. TETHER operates via a two-stage neuro-symbolic mechanism: first, it constructs a document skeleton from the raw ToC using a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) empowered by spatio-semantic constraints; second, it employs an anchor-based alignment strategy to tether content blocks to this skeleton, effectively resolving boundary ambiguities. Evaluated across a multilingual benchmark of ESG reports, product manuals, and annual reports, TETHER delivers highly precise, state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot hierarchy recovery, outperforming deep hierarchical recovery models, dedicated parsers, and general-purpose LMMs. Moreover, stress tests highlight TETHER’s resilience to sparse omissions and textual noise, demonstrating that its precise semantic alignment is fundamentally anchored in topological and depth fidelity. Crucially, ablations confirm the framework’s architectural irreducibility, while achieving 90% token reduction and drastic speedups over end-to-end baselines, establishing a compelling equilibrium between structural precision and deployment scalability.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T TETHER: Training-Free, Elastic, ToC-Anchored Hierarchy Extraction and Recovery in Design-Driven Long Documents
%A Zou, Yu
%A Chen, Yan
%A Zeng, Jialei
%A Zhou, Xiaorui
%A Zhong, Aixi
%A Zhou, Qi
%A You, Haoran
%A Jiang, Ke
%A Hu, Changyu
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F zou-etal-2026-tether
%X Converting complex documents into structured knowledge constitutes the critical infrastructure urgently required for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in downstream research. However, blind to the Table of Contents (ToC) as a macro-structure, existing bottom-up paradigms rely on localized visual cues, inducing heuristic fragility in high-entropy layouts where visual prominence decouples from logical depth; meanwhile, direct LLM extraction lacks spatial grounding, triggering hallucinations in long contexts. To address this, we introduce TETHER, a training-free framework that elevates the ToC from discarded noise to a vital structural prior, enabling robust adaptation across design-driven long documents. TETHER operates via a two-stage neuro-symbolic mechanism: first, it constructs a document skeleton from the raw ToC using a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) empowered by spatio-semantic constraints; second, it employs an anchor-based alignment strategy to tether content blocks to this skeleton, effectively resolving boundary ambiguities. Evaluated across a multilingual benchmark of ESG reports, product manuals, and annual reports, TETHER delivers highly precise, state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot hierarchy recovery, outperforming deep hierarchical recovery models, dedicated parsers, and general-purpose LMMs. Moreover, stress tests highlight TETHER’s resilience to sparse omissions and textual noise, demonstrating that its precise semantic alignment is fundamentally anchored in topological and depth fidelity. Crucially, ablations confirm the framework’s architectural irreducibility, while achieving 90% token reduction and drastic speedups over end-to-end baselines, establishing a compelling equilibrium between structural precision and deployment scalability.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2354/
%P 53469-53479
Markdown (Informal)
[TETHER: Training-Free, Elastic, ToC-Anchored Hierarchy Extraction and Recovery in Design-Driven Long Documents](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2354/) (Zou et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Jialei Zeng, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Qi Zhou, Haoran You, Ke Jiang, and Changyu Hu. 2026. TETHER: Training-Free, Elastic, ToC-Anchored Hierarchy Extraction and Recovery in Design-Driven Long Documents. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 53469–53479, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.