Shahid Iqbal Rai
2026
Frame-Semantic Knowledge Injection for Event-Level Inference in LLMs
Shahid Iqbal Rai | Danilo Croce | Roberto Basili
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Shahid Iqbal Rai | Danilo Croce | Roberto Basili
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) are fluent but often brittle when interpretation depends on external information (e.g., events or participant roles), as next-token prediction does not explicitly encode situation-level semantic constraints. FrameNet provides a structured account of semantics through its inventory of frames, roles, and relations. We present a scalable framework that injects frame-semantic knowledge into LLMs via LoRA, moving from fact-oriented prompting to principle-oriented supervision over the full FrameNet inventory. The supervision encodes semantic constraints through semantic types, sense-aware definitions, frame relations, and role-annotated examples. To test whether this knowledge generalizes beyond surface cues, we use Natural Language Inference (NLI) as a diagnostic task for event-level reasoning. Experiments on CONFER and SNLI show consistent gains over Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct in zero-shot and few-shot settings, especially for entailment and contradiction. Complementary semantic role labeling analyses further indicate improved sensitivity to frame, role, and span structure.
2025
Injecting Frame Semantics into Large Language Models via Prompt-Based Fine-Tuning
Shahid Iqbal Rai | Danilo Croce | Roberto Basili
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)
Shahid Iqbal Rai | Danilo Croce | Roberto Basili
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse NLP tasks, yet they often produce outputs lacking semantic coherence due to insufficient grounding in structured linguistic knowledge. This paper proposes a novel method for injecting Frame Semantics into a pretrained LLaMA model using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Leveraging FrameNet (a rich resource of over 1,000 semantic frames) we construct a training corpus comprising structured triples of frame definitions, frame elements, and lexical units. Our method encodes these examples into the model via LoRA adapters and evaluates performance using zero-shot prompting for textual entailment and semantic role labeling (SRL) over Framenet. Experimental results show that our adapted frame-aware LLM substantially outperforms the baseline across closed, open-ended, and multiple-choice prompts. Moreover, we observe significant improvements in SRL accuracy, demonstrating the efficacy of combining frame-semantic theory with parameter-efficient pretraining.