Cited by 213Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Revisiting Relation Extraction in the era of Large Language Models

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Wadhwa, Somin, Amir, Silvio, Wallace, Byron·2023·Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

Relation extraction (RE) is the core NLP task of inferring semantic relationships between entities from text.Standard supervised RE techniques entail training modules to tag tokens comprising entity spans and then predict the relationship between them.Recent work has instead treated the problem as a sequence-tosequence task, linearizing relations between entities as target strings to be generated conditioned on the input.Here we push the limits of this approach, using larger language models (GPT-3 and Flan-T5 large) than considered in prior work and evaluating their performance on standard RE tasks under varying levels of supervision.We address issues inherent to evaluating generative approaches to RE by doing human evaluations, in lieu of relying on exact matching.Under this refined evaluation, we find that: (1) Few-shot prompting with GPT-3 achieves near SOTA performance, i.e., roughly equivalent to existing fully supervised models; (2) Flan-T5 is not as capable in the fewshot setting, but supervising and fine-tuning it with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style explanations (generated via GPT-3) yields SOTA results.We release this model as a new baseline for RE tasks 1 .

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  • This dependency is a shared limitation of agentic memory systems that rely on LLM-based structural inference, as they are susceptible to extraction errors and hallucinations.

    “This dependency is a shared limitation of agentic memory systems that rely on LLM-based structural inference, as they are susceptible to extraction errors and hallucinations (Pan et al., 2024; Xi et al., 2025; Wadhwa et al., 2023).”

    From MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI Agents (2026) · cites this paper as Wadhwa et al., 2023

    The Few-Shot RE with Flan-T5 section reports non-conforming outputs and out-of-domain relations, supporting the point that LLM-based relation extraction can make errors. The paper does not examine agentic memory systems or establish that hallucinations are a shared limitation of those systems. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Brown Tom, Mann Benjamin, Ryder Nick, Subbiah Melanie, Jared D Kaplan Prafulla Dhariwal, Neelakantan Arvind, Shyam Pranav, Sastry Girish, Askell Amanda, Agarwal Sandhini, Herbert-Voss Ariel, Krueger Gretchen, Henighan Tom, Child Rewon, Ramesh Aditya, Ziegler Daniel, Wu Jeffrey, Winter Clemens, Hesse Chris, Chen Mark, Sigler Eric, Litwin Mateusz, Gray Scott, Chess Benjamin, Clark Jack, Berner Christopher, Sam McCandlish Alec Radford, Sutskever Ilya, and Amodei Dario. 2020a. Language models are few-shot learners. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 33, pages 1877– 1901. Curran Associates, Inc.
  2. Paolini Giovanni, Athiwaratkun Ben, Krone Jason, Ma Jie, Achille Alessandro, ANUBHAI RISHITA, Santos Cicero Nogueira dos, Xiang Bing, and Soatto Stefano. 2021. Structured prediction as translation between augmented natural languages. In International Conference on Learning Representations.

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Authors
Wadhwa, S., Amir, S., & Wallace, B.
Affiliations
Northeastern University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2023
Volume
2023
Pages
15566-15589
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385571451
Cited by
207
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 53 · 2025: 74 · 2024: 65 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 1
FWCI
36.50
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1750978)
  • National Institutes of Health (5r01lm012086-08)
  • U.S. National Library of Medicine (R01-LM012086)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
relation extraction, large language models, GPT-3, Flan-T5, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, human evaluation, sequence-to-sequence generation, entity relationships, fine-tuning

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