# GPT Struct Me: Probing GPT Models on Narrative Entity Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (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)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [News Summarization and Evaluation in the Era of GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12356/) (2022)
- [Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13625/) (2020)
- [Does Synthetic Data Generation of LLMs Help Clinical Text Mining?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04360/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Feasibility of ChatGPT for Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03836/) (2023)
- [Heroes, Villains, and Victims, and GPT-3: Automated Extraction of Character Roles Without Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07557/) (2022)
- [Improving Portuguese Semantic Role Labeling with Transformers and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01213/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GPT for Games: A Scoping Review (2020-2023)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17794/) (2024)
- [GPT for Games: An Updated Scoping Review (2020-2024)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00308/) (2024)
- [ClaimPT: A Portuguese Dataset of Annotated Claims in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19490/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The importance of systems that can extract structured information from textual data becomes increasingly pronounced given the ever-increasing volume of text produced on a daily basis. Having a system that can effectively extract such information in an interoperable manner would be an asset for several domains, be it finance, health, or legal. Recent developments in natural language processing led to the production of powerful language models that can, to some degree, mimic human intelligence. Such effectiveness raises a pertinent question: Can these models be leveraged for the extraction of structured information? In this work, we address this question by evaluating the capabilities of two state-of-the-art language models -- GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, commonly known as ChatGPT -- in the extraction of narrative entities, namely events, participants, and temporal expressions. This study is conducted on the Text2Story Lusa dataset, a collection of 119 Portuguese news articles whose annotation framework includes a set of entity structures along with several tags and attribute values. We first select the best prompt template through an ablation study over prompt components that provide varying degrees of information on a subset of documents of the dataset. Subsequently, we use the best templates to evaluate the effectiveness of the models on the remaining documents. The results obtained indicate that GPT models are competitive with out-of-the-box baseline systems, presenting an all-in-one alternative for practitioners with limited resources. By studying the strengths and limitations of these models in the context of information extraction, we offer insights that can guide future improvements and avenues to explore in this field.