Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation for Agentic AI with a Universal Evaluation Framework

Abstract: The evolution of AI systems toward agentic operation and context-aware retrieval necessitates transforming unstructured text into structured formats like tables, knowledge graphs, and charts. While such conversions enable critical applications from summarization to data mining, current research lacks a comprehensive synthesis of methodologies, datasets, and metrics. This systematic review examines text-to-structure techniques and the encountered challenges, evaluates current datasets and assessment criteria, and outlines potential directions for future research. We also introduce a universal evaluation framework for structured outputs, establishing text-to-structure as foundational infrastructure for next-generation AI systems.