Consistent Discourse-level Temporal Relation Extraction Using Large Language Models

Yi Fan, Michael Strube


Abstract
Understanding temporal relations between events in a text is essential for determining its temporal structure. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred research on temporal relation extraction. However, LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot and few-shot settings, often underperforming smaller fine-tuned models. Despite these limitations, little attention has been given to improving LLMs in temporal structure extraction tasks. This study systematically examines LLMs’ ability to extract and infer discourse-level temporal relations, identifying factors influencing their reasoning and extraction capabilities, including input context, reasoning process and ensuring consistency. We propose a three-step framework to improve LLMs’ temporal relation extraction capabilities: context selection, prompts inspired by Allen’s interval algebra (Allen, 1983), and reflection-based consistency learning (Shinn et al., 2024). Our results show the effectiveness of our method in guiding LLMs towards structured processing of temporal structure in discourse.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1010
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18605–18622
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1010/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Fan and Michael Strube. 2025. Consistent Discourse-level Temporal Relation Extraction Using Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 18605–18622, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Consistent Discourse-level Temporal Relation Extraction Using Large Language Models (Fan & Strube, Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1010.pdf
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