Can LLMs Extract Frame-Semantic Arguments?

Jacob Devasier, Rishabh Mediratta, Chengkai Li


Abstract
Frame-semantic parsing is a critical task in natural language understanding, yet the ability of large language models (LLMs) to extract frame-semantic arguments remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs on frame-semantic argument identification, analyzing the impact of input representation formats, model architectures, and generalization to unseen and out-of-domain samples. Our experiments, spanning models from 0.5B to 72B parameters, reveal that JSON-based representations significantly enhance performance, and while larger models generally perform better, smaller models can achieve competitive results through fine-tuning. We also introduce a novel approach to frame identification leveraging predicted frame elements, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ambiguous targets. Despite strong generalization capabilities, our analysis finds that LLMs still struggle with out-of-domain data.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1557
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
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30597–30610
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1557/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jacob Devasier, Rishabh Mediratta, and Chengkai Li. 2025. Can LLMs Extract Frame-Semantic Arguments?. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 30597–30610, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can LLMs Extract Frame-Semantic Arguments? (Devasier et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1557.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1557.checklist.pdf