Oscar Sainz, Naiara Perez, Julen Etxaniz, Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Itziar Aldabe, Iker García-Ferrero, Aimar Zabala, Ekhi Azurmendi, German Rigau, Eneko Agirre, Mikel Artetxe, Aitor Soroa. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Julen Etxaniz, Oscar Sainz, Naiara Perez, Itziar Aldabe, German Rigau, Eneko Agirre, Aitor Ormazabal, Mikel Artetxe, Aitor Soroa. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Cross-lingual transfer-learning is widely used in Event Extraction for low-resource languages and involves a Multilingual Language Model that is trained in a source language and applied to the target language. This paper studies whether the typological similarity between source and target languages impacts the performance of cross-lingual transfer, an under-explored topic. We first focus on Basque as the target language, which is an ideal target language because it is typologically different from surrounding languages. Our experiments on three Event Extraction tasks show that the shared linguistic characteristic between source and target languages does have an impact on transfer quality. Further analysis of 72 language pairs reveals that for tasks that involve token classification such as entity and event trigger identification, common writing script and morphological features produce higher quality cross-lingual transfer. In contrast, for tasks involving structural prediction like argument extraction, common word order is the most relevant feature. In addition, we show that when increasing the training size, not all the languages scale in the same way in the cross-lingual setting. To perform the experiments we introduce EusIE, an event extraction dataset for Basque, which follows the Multilingual Event Extraction dataset (MEE). The dataset and code are publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with instruction tuning have made significant progress when generalizing to unseen tasks. However, they have been less successful in Information Extraction (IE), lagging behind task-specific models. Typically, IE tasks are characterized by complex annotation guidelines which describe the task and give examples to humans. Previous attempts to leverage such information have failed, even with the largest models, as they are not able to follow the guidelines out-of-the-box. In this paper we propose GoLLIE (Guideline-following Large Language Model for IE), a model able to improve zero-shot results on unseen IE tasks by virtue of being fine-tuned to comply with annotation guidelines. Comprehensive evaluation empirically demonstrates that GoLLIE is able to generalize to and follow unseen guidelines, outperforming previous attempts at zero-shot information extraction. The ablation study shows that detailed guidelines is key for good results. Code, data and models will be made publicly available.

Language Models are the core for almost any Natural Language Processing system nowadays.One of their particularities is their contextualized representations, a game changer feature when a disambiguation between word senses is necessary.In this paper we aim to explore to what extent language models are capable of discerning among senses at inference time.We performed this analysis by prompting commonly used Languages Models such as BERT or RoBERTa to perform the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD).We leverage the relation between word senses and domains, and cast WSD as a textual entailment problem, where the different hypothesis refer to the domains of the word senses.Our results show that this approach is indeed effective, close to supervised systems.

Relation extraction systems require large amounts of labeled examples which are costly to annotate.In this work we reformulate relation extraction as an entailment task, with simple, hand-made, verbalizations of relations produced in less than 15 minutes per relation.The system relies on a pretrained textual entailment engine which is run as-is (no training examples, zero-shot) or further fine-tuned on labeled examples (few-shot or fully trained).In our experiments on TACRED we attain 63% F1 zero-shot, 69% with 16 examples per relation (17% points better than the best supervised system on the same conditions), and only 4 points short of the state-of-the-art (which uses 20 times more training data).We also show that the performance can be improved significantly with larger entailment models, up to 12 points in zero-shot, giving the best results to date on TACRED when fully trained.The analysis shows that our few-shot systems are especially effective when discriminating between relations, and that the performance difference in low data regimes comes mainly from identifying no-relation cases.

In this paper we present a system that exploits different pre-trained Language Models for assigning domain labels to WordNet synsets without any kind of supervision.Furthermore, the system is not restricted to use a particular set of domain labels.We exploit the knowledge encoded within different off-theshelf pre-trained Language Models and task formulations to infer the domain label of a particular WordNet definition.The proposed zero-shot system achieves a new state-of-theart on the English dataset used in the evaluation.

In this paper we present a relation extraction system that given a text extracts pedagogically motivated relation types, as a previous step to obtaining a semantic representation of the text which will make possible to automatically generate questions for reading comprehension. The system maps pedagogically motivated relations with relations from ConceptNet and deploys Distant Supervision for relation extraction. We run a study on a subset of those relationships in order to analyse the viability of our approach. For that, we build a domain-specific relation extraction system and explore two relation extraction models: a state-of-the-art model based on transfer learning and a discrete feature based machine learning model. Experiments show that the neural model obtains better results in terms of F-score and we yield promising results on the subset of relations suitable for pedagogical purposes. We thus consider that distant supervision for relation extraction is a valid approach in our target domain, i.e. biology.