Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction

Zehan Li, Fu Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Jiawei Li, Zhou Li, Jingwei Cheng, Tianyue Peng


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in language understanding and generation, leading to growing interest in zero-shot relation triplet extraction (ZeroRTE), a task that aims to extract triplets for unseen relations without annotated data. However, existing methods typically depend on costly fine-tuning and lack the structured semantic guidance required for accurate and interpretable extraction. To overcome these limitations, we propose FrameRTE, a novel ZeroRTE framework that adopts a “frame first, then extract” paradigm. Rather than extracting triplets directly, FrameRTE first constructs high-quality Relation Semantic Frames (RSFs) through a unified pipeline that integrates frame retrieval, synthesis, and enhancement. These RSFs serve as structured and interpretable knowledge scaffolds that guide frozen LLMs in the extraction process. Building upon these RSFs, we further introduce a human-inspired three-stage reasoning pipeline consisting of semantic frame evocation, frame-guided triplet extraction, and core frame elements validation to achieve semantically constrained extraction. Experiments demonstrate that FrameRTE achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple benchmarks. Moreover, the RSFs we construct serve as high-quality semantic resources that can enhance other extraction methods, showcasing the synergy between linguistic knowledge and foundation models.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1391
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
27351–27364
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1391/
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Cite (ACL):
Zehan Li, Fu Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Jiawei Li, Zhou Li, Jingwei Cheng, and Tianyue Peng. 2025. Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 27351–27364, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (Li et al., EMNLP 2025)
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