Semantic Atoms for Scalable Text Analysis in Data Analytics in the Era of LLM-Based Agents

Jinxiang Xie, Zihao Li, Rui Ding, Bartuer Zhou, Shi Han +1

Much of the information needed for data analysis is buried in text columns: an analyst may infer customer frustration from complaint text and use it to explain resolution time. We call workloads in which processing text columns is central to subsequent data analysis TADA (\emph{Text Analysis in Data Analytics}). In an agentic setting, the user's query dynamically specifies this processing, and answering it interleaves LLM-based semantic steps with exact SQL or Python operations. This mixed execution raises two design questions: which work should be neural and which symbolic, and which semantic outputs later steps can reuse. We address them for agent-planned TADA workflows with two complementary, query-driven semantic atoms. Each atom takes a sequence of text items and a natural-language query specifying the semantic task: \textbf{Tagging} returns one string per input item, while \textbf{Categorization} returns $M$ category objects over $N$ input items. Tagging results are materialized as a row-aligned column and Categorization results as a category table; SQL or Python then performs exact computation over this exposed state. We realize this interface in TADA-Agent, whose atoms…