Crossing Domains without Labels: Distant Supervision for Term Extraction

Elena Senger, Yuri Campbell, Rob Van Der Goot, Barbara Plank


Abstract
Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) is a critical component in downstream NLP tasks such as document tagging, ontology construction and patent analysis. Current state-of-the-art methods require expensive human annotation and struggle with domain transfer, limiting their practical deployment. This highlights the need for more robust, scalable solutions and realistic evaluation settings. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning seven diverse domains, enabling performance evaluation at both the document- and corpus-levels. Furthermore, we propose a robust LLM-based model that outperforms both supervised cross-domain encoder models and few-shot learning baselines and performs competitively with its GPT-4o teacher on this benchmark.The first step of our approach is generating psuedo-labels with this black-box LLM on general and scientific domains to ensure generalizability. Building on this data, we fine-tune the first LLMs for ATE. To further enhance document-level consistency, oftentimes needed for downstream tasks, we introduce lightweight post-hoc heuristics. Our approach exceeds previous approaches on 5/7 domains with an average improvement of 10 percentage points. We release our dataset and fine-tuned models to support future research in this area.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.95
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1366–1378
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.95/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Senger, Yuri Campbell, Rob Van Der Goot, and Barbara Plank. 2025. Crossing Domains without Labels: Distant Supervision for Term Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 1366–1378, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Crossing Domains without Labels: Distant Supervision for Term Extraction (Senger et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.95.pdf