<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="sharif-etal-2026-improving">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Omar</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Sharif</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Soroush</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Vosoughi</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Nikhil</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Singh</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-462-0</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>When information extraction fails, a natural instinct is to improve the model doing it: for example, by scaling it up or refining its reasoning. In this paper, we show that another part of the pipeline matters at least as much: the queries used to elicit this information. Across four clinical benchmarks and five LLMs, improving the question design alone raises performance by 18.6 F1-score points, i.e. more than using larger extraction models. To make such question design learnable, we introduce List of Questions (LoQ), which generates document-specific question sets, and FeedQ, a feedback-driven optimization method that iteratively refines questions against extraction outcomes. The resulting optimized questions can be used to train lightweight generators: with fine-tuning, 4B-parameter models match or outperform expert-derived baselines and substantially exceed the performance of much larger untuned models. We release a dataset of 12,820 optimized questions to support a broader shift in information extraction research toward treating question design as a first-class problem.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">sharif-etal-2026-improving</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.800/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-10</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>16952</start>
            <end>16972</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries
%A Sharif, Omar
%A Vosoughi, Soroush
%A Singh, Nikhil
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F sharif-etal-2026-improving
%X When information extraction fails, a natural instinct is to improve the model doing it: for example, by scaling it up or refining its reasoning. In this paper, we show that another part of the pipeline matters at least as much: the queries used to elicit this information. Across four clinical benchmarks and five LLMs, improving the question design alone raises performance by 18.6 F1-score points, i.e. more than using larger extraction models. To make such question design learnable, we introduce List of Questions (LoQ), which generates document-specific question sets, and FeedQ, a feedback-driven optimization method that iteratively refines questions against extraction outcomes. The resulting optimized questions can be used to train lightweight generators: with fine-tuning, 4B-parameter models match or outperform expert-derived baselines and substantially exceed the performance of much larger untuned models. We release a dataset of 12,820 optimized questions to support a broader shift in information extraction research toward treating question design as a first-class problem.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.800/
%P 16952-16972

Markdown (Informal)

[Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.800/) (Sharif et al., Findings 2026)

• Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries (Sharif et al., Findings 2026)

ACL

• Omar Sharif, Soroush Vosoughi, and Nikhil Singh. 2026. Improving Information Extraction with Learned Queries. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 16952–16972, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.