LLMs Can Also Do Well! Breaking Barriers in Semantic Role Labeling via Large Language Models

Xinxin Li, Huiyao Chen, Chengjun Liu, Jing Li, Meishan Zhang, Jun Yu, Min Zhang


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a crucial task of natural language processing (NLP). Although generative decoder-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, they still lag behind state-of-the-art encoder-decoder (BERT-like) models in SRL. In this work, we seek to bridge this gap by equipping LLMs for SRL with two mechanisms: (a) retrieval-augmented generation and (b) self-correction. The first mechanism enables LLMs to leverage external linguistic knowledge such as predicate and argument structure descriptions, while the second allows LLMs to identify and correct inconsistent SRL outputs. We conduct extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks of SRL (CPB1.0, CoNLL-2009, and CoNLL-2012). Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Chinese and English, marking the first successful application of LLMs to surpass encoder-decoder approaches in SRL.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1189
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
23162–23180
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1189/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinxin Li, Huiyao Chen, Chengjun Liu, Jing Li, Meishan Zhang, Jun Yu, and Min Zhang. 2025. LLMs Can Also Do Well! Breaking Barriers in Semantic Role Labeling via Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 23162–23180, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLMs Can Also Do Well! Breaking Barriers in Semantic Role Labeling via Large Language Models (Li et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1189.pdf