Better Benchmarking LLMs for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing

Ana Ezquerro, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, David Vilares


Abstract
While LLMs excel in zero-shot tasks, their performance in linguistic challenges like syntactic parsing has been less scrutinized. This paper studies state-of-the-art open-weight LLMs on the task by comparing them to baselines that do not have access to the input sentence, including baselines that have not been used in this context such as random projective trees or optimal linear arrangements. The results show that most of the tested LLMs cannot outperform the best uninformed baselines, with only the newest and largest versions of LLaMA doing so for most languages, and still achieving rather low performance. Thus, accurate zero-shot syntactic parsing is not forthcoming with open LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.nodalida-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Month:
march
Year:
2025
Address:
Tallinn, Estonia
Editors:
Richard Johansson, Sara Stymne
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
121–135
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nodalida-1.13/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana Ezquerro, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, and David Vilares. 2025. Better Benchmarking LLMs for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), pages 121–135, Tallinn, Estonia. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Better Benchmarking LLMs for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing (Ezquerro et al., NoDaLiDa 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nodalida-1.13.pdf