Zero-shot Temporal Relation Extraction with ChatGPT

Chenhan Yuan, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou


Abstract
The goal of temporal relation extraction is to infer the temporal relation between two events in the document. Supervised models are dominant in this task. In this work, we investigate ChatGPT’s ability on zero-shot temporal relation extraction. We designed three different prompt techniques to break down the task and evaluate ChatGPT. Our experiments show that ChatGPT’s performance has a large gap with that of supervised methods and can heavily rely on the design of prompts. We further demonstrate that ChatGPT can infer more small relation classes correctly than supervised methods. The current shortcomings of ChatGPT on temporal relation extraction are also discussed in this paper. We found that ChatGPT cannot keep consistency during temporal inference and it fails in actively long-dependency temporal inference.
Anthology ID:
2023.bionlp-1.7
Volume:
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Dina Demner-fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Kevin Cohen
Venue:
BioNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–102
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bionlp-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bionlp-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenhan Yuan, Qianqian Xie, and Sophia Ananiadou. 2023. Zero-shot Temporal Relation Extraction with ChatGPT. In The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks, pages 92–102, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Temporal Relation Extraction with ChatGPT (Yuan et al., BioNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bionlp-1.7.pdf