@inproceedings{nathan-etal-2026-tool,
title = "Tool-Aware Planning for Contact-Center Analytics: Evaluating {LLM}s through Lineage-Guided Query Decomposition",
author = "Nathan, Varun and
Guha, Shreyas and
Kumar, Ayush",
editor = "Mille, Simon and
Gehrmann, Sebastian and
Schmidtov{\'a}, Patr{\'i}cia and
Du{\v{s}}ek, Ond{\v{r}}ej and
Fadaee, Marzieh and
Lo, Kyle and
Santus, Enrico and
Stanovsky, Gabriel",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics ({GEM})",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.73/",
pages = "893--943",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-423-1",
abstract = "We present a domain-grounded benchmark and evaluation framework for tool-aware plan generation in contact-center analytics, where answering a business-insights query requires decomposing it into executable steps over structured tools (Text2SQL over Snowflake), unstructured tools (RAG over transcripts), and LLM-based synthesis, with explicit depends{\_}on relations for safe parallel execution. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reference-based plan evaluation framework with two complementary views{---}a metric-wise evaluator spanning seven dimensions (e.g., tool{--}prompt alignment, query adherence) and a one-shot evaluator that compares a candidate plan against a reference plan; (ii) a lineage-driven data curation methodology that uses an iterative evaluator{\textrightarrow}optimizer loop to refine initial plans into high-quality plan lineages while reducing manual effort; and (iii) a large-scale study of 14 LLMs across model families and sizes on their ability to generate step-by-step, executable, tool-assigned plans, evaluated with and without lineage in the prompt. Empirically, LLMs continue to struggle on compound queries and on plans longer than four steps; the highest aggregate metric-wise score is 84.8 (Claude-3-7-Sonnet), while the strongest one-shot A+ rate (Extremely Good or Very Good) is only 49.75{\%} (o3-mini). Lineage yields mixed overall gains but improves several strong models and often helps step executability. Overall, our results expose persistent weaknesses in tool understanding{---}especially tool{--}prompt alignment and tool-usage completeness{---}and show that shorter, simpler plans remain markedly easier. The benchmark, evaluation framework, and findings provide a practical path for assessing and improving agentic planning with tools in enterprise question-answering settings. An anonymized dataset with human-annotated reference plans, plan lineages, and per-planner outputs for all 14 planners is available at the anonymous repository linked in the paper."
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<abstract>We present a domain-grounded benchmark and evaluation framework for tool-aware plan generation in contact-center analytics, where answering a business-insights query requires decomposing it into executable steps over structured tools (Text2SQL over Snowflake), unstructured tools (RAG over transcripts), and LLM-based synthesis, with explicit depends_on relations for safe parallel execution. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reference-based plan evaluation framework with two complementary views—a metric-wise evaluator spanning seven dimensions (e.g., tool–prompt alignment, query adherence) and a one-shot evaluator that compares a candidate plan against a reference plan; (ii) a lineage-driven data curation methodology that uses an iterative evaluator→optimizer loop to refine initial plans into high-quality plan lineages while reducing manual effort; and (iii) a large-scale study of 14 LLMs across model families and sizes on their ability to generate step-by-step, executable, tool-assigned plans, evaluated with and without lineage in the prompt. Empirically, LLMs continue to struggle on compound queries and on plans longer than four steps; the highest aggregate metric-wise score is 84.8 (Claude-3-7-Sonnet), while the strongest one-shot A+ rate (Extremely Good or Very Good) is only 49.75% (o3-mini). Lineage yields mixed overall gains but improves several strong models and often helps step executability. Overall, our results expose persistent weaknesses in tool understanding—especially tool–prompt alignment and tool-usage completeness—and show that shorter, simpler plans remain markedly easier. The benchmark, evaluation framework, and findings provide a practical path for assessing and improving agentic planning with tools in enterprise question-answering settings. An anonymized dataset with human-annotated reference plans, plan lineages, and per-planner outputs for all 14 planners is available at the anonymous repository linked in the paper.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Tool-Aware Planning for Contact-Center Analytics: Evaluating LLMs through Lineage-Guided Query Decomposition
%A Nathan, Varun
%A Guha, Shreyas
%A Kumar, Ayush
%Y Mille, Simon
%Y Gehrmann, Sebastian
%Y Schmidtová, Patrícia
%Y Dušek, Ondřej
%Y Fadaee, Marzieh
%Y Lo, Kyle
%Y Santus, Enrico
%Y Stanovsky, Gabriel
%S Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-423-1
%F nathan-etal-2026-tool
%X We present a domain-grounded benchmark and evaluation framework for tool-aware plan generation in contact-center analytics, where answering a business-insights query requires decomposing it into executable steps over structured tools (Text2SQL over Snowflake), unstructured tools (RAG over transcripts), and LLM-based synthesis, with explicit depends_on relations for safe parallel execution. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reference-based plan evaluation framework with two complementary views—a metric-wise evaluator spanning seven dimensions (e.g., tool–prompt alignment, query adherence) and a one-shot evaluator that compares a candidate plan against a reference plan; (ii) a lineage-driven data curation methodology that uses an iterative evaluator→optimizer loop to refine initial plans into high-quality plan lineages while reducing manual effort; and (iii) a large-scale study of 14 LLMs across model families and sizes on their ability to generate step-by-step, executable, tool-assigned plans, evaluated with and without lineage in the prompt. Empirically, LLMs continue to struggle on compound queries and on plans longer than four steps; the highest aggregate metric-wise score is 84.8 (Claude-3-7-Sonnet), while the strongest one-shot A+ rate (Extremely Good or Very Good) is only 49.75% (o3-mini). Lineage yields mixed overall gains but improves several strong models and often helps step executability. Overall, our results expose persistent weaknesses in tool understanding—especially tool–prompt alignment and tool-usage completeness—and show that shorter, simpler plans remain markedly easier. The benchmark, evaluation framework, and findings provide a practical path for assessing and improving agentic planning with tools in enterprise question-answering settings. An anonymized dataset with human-annotated reference plans, plan lineages, and per-planner outputs for all 14 planners is available at the anonymous repository linked in the paper.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.73/
%P 893-943
Markdown (Informal)
[Tool-Aware Planning for Contact-Center Analytics: Evaluating LLMs through Lineage-Guided Query Decomposition](https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.73/) (Nathan et al., GEM 2026)
ACL