CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors

Peng Li, Tianxiang Sun, Qiong Tang, Hang Yan, Yuanbin Wu, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu

Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning ability on many NLP tasks. A common practice is to recast the task into a text-to-text format such that generative LLMs of natural language (NL-LLMs) like GPT-3 can be prompted to solve it. However, it is nontrivial to perform information extraction (IE) tasks with NL-LLMs since the output of the IE task is usually structured and therefore is hard to be converted into plain text. In this paper, we propose to recast the structured output in the form of code instead of natural language and utilize generative LLMs of code (Code-LLMs) such as Codex to perform IE tasks, in particular, named entity recognition and relation extraction. In contrast to NL-LLMs, we show that Code-LLMs can be well-aligned with these IE tasks by designing code-style prompts and formulating these IE tasks as code generation tasks. Experiment results on seven benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuning moderate-size pre-trained models specially designed for IE tasks (e.g., UIE) and prompting NL-LLMs under few-shot settings. We further conduct a series of in-depth analyses to demonstrate the merits of leveraging Code-LLMs for IE tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.855
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15339–15353
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.855
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.855
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peng Li, Tianxiang Sun, Qiong Tang, Hang Yan, Yuanbin Wu, Xuanjing Huang, and Xipeng Qiu. 2023. CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15339–15353, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors (Li et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2023.acl-long.855.pdf
PDF Search