A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Graph2text or Graph2token: A Perspective of Large Language Modelsfor Graph Learning
Authors: Yu, Shuo; Wang, Yingbo; Li, Ruolin; Liu, Guchun; Shen, Yanming; Ji, Shaoxiong; Li, Bowen; Han, Fengling; Zhang, Xiuzhen; Xia, Feng
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publication year: 2026
Journal: ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ISSN: 1046-8188
eISSN: 1558-2868
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3786600
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: No Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Partially Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1145/3786600
Graphs are prevalent in numerous real-world applications. Previous methods directly model graph structures and achieve significant success. However, these methods encounter bottlenecks due to the inherent irregularity of graphs. An innovative solution is converting graphs into textual representations, thereby harnessing the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to process and comprehend graphs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of methodologies for applying LLMs to graphs, termed LLM4graph. The core of LLM4graph lies in transforming graphs into texts for LLMs to understand and analyze. Thus, we propose a novel taxonomy of LLM4graph methods from the view of the transformation. Specifically, existing methods can be divided into two paradigms: Graph2text and Graph2token, which transform graphs into texts or tokens as the input of LLMs, respectively. We point out four challenges during the transformation to systematically present existing methods from a problem-oriented perspective. For practical concerns, we provide a guideline for researchers on selecting appropriate models and LLMs for different graphs and hardware constraints. To empirically evaluate our taxonomy and different technical choices, we conduct experiments with representative methods in Graph2text and Graph2token. We also identify five future research directions for LLM4graph.