# Structured Semantic Information Helps Retrieve Better Examples for In-Context Learning Applied to Few-Shot Relation Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10147/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Relation Extraction using LSTMs on Sequences and Tree Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00770/) (2016)
- [Finding Support Examples for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13539/) (2023)
- [In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09881/) (2023)
- [Effective Modeling of Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09886/) (2019)
- [A Decade of Knowledge Graphs in Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00105/) (2022)
- [FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13873/) (2024)
- [How to Unleash the Power of Large Language Models for Few-shot Relation Extraction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01555/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Few-shot Relation Classification: Evaluation Data and Classification Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08481/) (2021)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18537/) (2024)
- [C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11254/) (2024)
- [Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05922/) (2023)
- [Learning to Retrieve Iteratively for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14739/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Role of Diversity in Example Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01842/) (2025)
- [Improving Unsupervised Relation Extraction by Augmenting Diverse Sentence Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00552/) (2023)
- [RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15743/) (2023)
- [Best of Both Worlds: A Pliable and Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03305/) (2024)
- [Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12021/) (2023)
- [From Examples to Rules: Neural Guided Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00475/) (2022)
- [Towards Realistic Few-Shot Relation Extraction: A New Meta Dataset and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04445/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Two-Stage Prompt Optimization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction: From Reasoning-Guided Search to Gradient-Guided Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents several strategies to automatically obtain additional examples for in-context learning, effectively transforming relation extraction from a 1-shot to a few-shot setting. Specifically, we introduce a novel strategy for example selection, in which new examples are selected based on the similarity of their underlying syntactic-semantic structure to the provided 1-shot example. We show that our strategy results in complementary word choices and sentence structures compared to LLM-generated examples. When both strategies are combined, the resulting hybrid system achieves a more holistic picture of the relations of interest than either method alone. Our framework transfers well across datasets (FS-TACRED and FS-FewRel) and LLM families (Qwen and Gemma). Overall, our hybrid system consistently outperforms alternative strategies achieving state-of-the-art performance on FS-TACRED and strong gains on a customized FewRel subset.