Rudrashis Poddar


2025

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Do LLMs Encode Frame Semantics? Evidence from Frame Identification
Jayanth Krishna Chundru | Rudrashis Poddar | Jie Cao | Tianyu Jiang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We investigate whether large language models encode latent knowledge of frame semantics, focusing on frame identification, a core challenge in frame semantic parsing that involves selecting the appropriate semantic frame for a target word in context. Using the FrameNet lexical resource, we evaluate models under prompt-based inference and observe that they can perform frame identification effectively even without explicit supervision. To assess the impact of task-specific training, we fine-tune the model on FrameNet data, which substantially improves in-domain accuracy while generalizing well to out-of-domain benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the models can generate semantically coherent frame definitions, highlighting the model’s internalized understanding of frame semantics.