RUIE: Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Model

Xincheng Liao, Junwen Duan, Yixi Huang, Jianxin Wang


Abstract
Unified information extraction (UIE) aims to extract diverse structured information from unstructured text. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for UIE, they require significant computational resources and often struggle to generalize to unseen tasks. We propose RUIE (Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction), a framework that leverages in-context learning for efficient task generalization. RUIE introduces a novel demonstration selection mechanism combining LLM preferences with a keyword-enhanced reward model, and employs a bi-encoder retriever trained through contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. As the first trainable retrieval framework for UIE, RUIE serves as a universal plugin for various LLMs. Experimental results on eight held-out datasets demonstrate RUIE’s effectiveness, with average F1-score improvements of 19.22 and 3.22 compared to instruction-tuning methods and other retrievers, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.645
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9640–9655
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.645/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xincheng Liao, Junwen Duan, Yixi Huang, and Jianxin Wang. 2025. RUIE: Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9640–9655, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RUIE: Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Model (Liao et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.645.pdf