# GoLLIE: Annotation Guidelines improve Zero-Shot Information-Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 119 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Data Contamination: From Memorization to Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08242/) (2022)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)
- [InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08085/) (2023)
- [Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Conditional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05919/) (2021)
- [CrossNER: Evaluating Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04373/) (2020)
- [Multi-Sentence Argument Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03766/) (2019)
- [Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03654/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 119)

- [Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17617/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15343/) (2024)
- [KnowCoder: Coding Structured Knowledge into LLMs for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07969/) (2024)
- [Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14215/) (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)
- [SciER: An Entity and Relation Extraction Dataset for Datasets, Methods, and Tasks in Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21155/) (2024)
- [Instruction-Tuning LLMs for Event Extraction with Annotation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16377/) (2025)
- [A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Structured Language Model Output for Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13364/) (2024)
- [Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08921/) (2023)
- [Logical Consistency of Large Language Models in Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16100/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16602/) (2024)
- [GLiREL -- Generalist Model for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03172/) (2025)
- [LTNER: Large Language Model Tagging for Named Entity Recognition with Contextualized Entity Marking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05624/) (2024)
- [TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00025/) (2026)
- [PaDeLLM-NER: Parallel Decoding in Large Language Models for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04838/) (2024)
- [Towards Better Multi-task Learning: A Framework for Optimizing Dataset Combinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11455/) (2024)
- [A Cooperative Multi-Agent Framework for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18702/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Prompt Optimization with Large Reasoning Models-A Case Study on Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07357/) (2025)
- [CHIMERA: A Knowledge Base of Scientific Idea Recombinations for Research Analysis and Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20779/) (2025)
- [MR-UIE: Multi-Perspective Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09082/) (2025)
- [IEPile: Unearthing Large-Scale Schema-Based Information Extraction Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14710/) (2024)
- [P-ICL: Point In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04960/) (2024)
- [Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11192/) (2024)
- [Show Less, Instruct More: Enriching Prompts with Definitions and Guidelines for Zero-Shot NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01272/) (2024)
- [Improving Few-Shot Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition by Instruction Tuning a Word-Embedding based Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00451/) (2024)
- [CoRank: LLM-Based Compact Reranking with Document Features for Scientific Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13757/) (2025)
- [Event Extraction in Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19537/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with instruction tuning have made significant progress when generalizing to unseen tasks. However, they have been less successful in Information Extraction (IE), lagging behind task-specific models. Typically, IE tasks are characterized by complex annotation guidelines that describe the task and give examples to humans. Previous attempts to leverage such information have failed, even with the largest models, as they are not able to follow the guidelines out of the box. In this paper, we propose GoLLIE (Guideline-following Large Language Model for IE), a model able to improve zero-shot results on unseen IE tasks by virtue of being fine-tuned to comply with annotation guidelines. Comprehensive evaluation empirically demonstrates that GoLLIE is able to generalize to and follow unseen guidelines, outperforming previous attempts at zero-shot information extraction. The ablation study shows that detailed guidelines are key for good results.