# Code4Struct: Code Generation for Few-Shot Event Structure Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12810 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12810/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05779/) (2021)
- [Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13625/) (2020)
- [Language Models of Code are Few-Shot Commonsense Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07128/) (2022)
- [Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Conditional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05919/) (2021)
- [Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09232/) (2021)
- [DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generation-Based Event Extraction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12724/) (2021)
- [Joint Extraction of Events and Entities within a Document Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03632/) (2016)
- [Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04901/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01030/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17617/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Is Not a Good Few-shot Information Extractor, but a Good Reranker for Hard Samples!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08559/) (2023)
- [GoLLIE: Annotation Guidelines improve Zero-Shot Information-Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03668/) (2023)
- [If LLM Is the Wizard, Then Code Is the Wand: A Survey on How Code Empowers Large Language Models to Serve as Intelligent Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00812/) (2024)
- [Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03642/) (2024)
- [LaMPilot: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving with Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04372/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02962/) (2023)
- [LLM-Ensemble: Optimal Large Language Model Ensemble Method for E-commerce Product Attribute Value Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00863/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Impact of Coding Data Instruction Fine-Tuning on Large Language Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20535/) (2024)
- [TextEE: Benchmark, Reevaluation, Reflections, and Future Challenges in Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09562/) (2023)
- [LeTI: Learning to Generate from Textual Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10314/) (2023)
- [Unlocking Reasoning Potential in Large Langauge Models by Scaling Code-form Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12452/) (2024)
- [ADELIE: Aligning Large Language Models on Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05008/) (2024)
- [C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11254/) (2024)
- [The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19213/) (2023)
- [ExtractGPT: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for Product Attribute Value Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12537/) (2023)
- [Using LLMs for the Extraction and Normalization of Product Attribute Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02130/) (2024)
- [Instruction-Tuning LLMs for Event Extraction with Annotation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16377/) (2025)
- [Why Can Large Language Models Generate Correct Chain-of-Thoughts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13571/) (2023)
- [Towards Truly Zero-shot Compositional Visual Reasoning with LLMs as Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01974/) (2024)
- [ViStruct: Visual Structural Knowledge Extraction via Curriculum Guided Code-Vision Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13258/) (2023)
- [Unit Test Generation using Generative AI : A Comparative Performance Analysis of Autogeneration Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10622/) (2023)
- [a1: Steep Test-time Scaling Law via Environment Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14597/) (2025)
- [Swarm Intelligence in Geo-Localization: A Multi-Agent Large Vision-Language Model Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11312/) (2024)
- [CodeTaxo: Enhancing Taxonomy Expansion with Limited Examples via Code Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09070/) (2024)
- [On-the-fly Definition Augmentation of LLMs for Biomedical NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00152/) (2024)
- [CHECKWHY: Causal Fact Verification via Argument Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10918/) (2024)
- [Explicit, Implicit, and Scattered: Revisiting Event Extraction to Capture Complex Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03594/) (2024)
- [Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02586/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Model (LLM) trained on a mixture of text and code has demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code. We observe that semantic structures can be conveniently translated into code and propose Code4Struct to leverage such text-to-structure translation capability to tackle structured prediction tasks. As a case study, we formulate Event Argument Extraction (EAE) as converting text into event-argument structures that can be represented as a class object using code. This alignment between structures and code enables us to take advantage of Programming Language (PL) features such as inheritance and type annotation to introduce external knowledge or add constraints. We show that, with sufficient in-context examples, formulating EAE as a code generation problem is advantageous over using variants of text-based prompts. Despite only using 20 training event instances for each event type, Code4Struct is comparable to supervised models trained on 4,202 instances and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) trained on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. Code4Struct can use 10-shot training data from a sibling event type to predict arguments for zero-resource event types and outperforms the zero-shot baseline by 12% absolute F1.