# GLiNER-Relex: A Unified Framework for Joint Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10108 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10108/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06127/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Relation Extraction using LSTMs on Sequences and Tree Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00770/) (2016)
- [Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Transformer Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07755/) (2019)
- [Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations Based on a Novel Tagging Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05075/) (2017)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [Label Verbalization and Entailment for Effective Zero- and Few-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03659/) (2021)
- [TPLinker: Single-stage Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations Through Token Pair Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13415/) (2020)
- [UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03279/) (2023)
- [RelationPrompt: Leveraging Prompts to Generate Synthetic Data for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09101/) (2022)
- [Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Set Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01675/) (2020)
- [ZS-BERT: Towards Zero-Shot Relation Extraction with Attribute Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04697/) (2021)
- [Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations Based on a Novel Decomposition Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04273/) (2019)
- [PRGC: Potential Relation and Global Correspondence Based Joint Relational Triple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09895/) (2021)
- [UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04292/) (2021)
- [NuNER: Entity Recognition Encoder Pre-training via LLM-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15343/) (2024)
- [InstructionNER: A Multi-Task Instruction-Based Generative Framework for Few-shot NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03903/) (2022)
- [OneRel:Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with One Module in One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05412/) (2022)
- [CrossRE: A Cross-Domain Dataset for Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09345/) (2022)
- [Consistency Guided Knowledge Retrieval and Denoising in LLMs for Zero-shot Document-level Relation Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13598/) (2024)
- [RE-Matching: A Fine-Grained Semantic Matching Method for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04954/) (2023)
- [Meta In-Context Learning Makes Large Language Models Better Zero and Few-Shot Relation Extractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17807/) (2024)
- [GLiREL -- Generalist Model for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03172/) (2025)

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

- [TWIX: a Two-Stage Approach for End-To-End Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00832/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Joint named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) is a fundamental task in natural language processing for constructing knowledge graphs from unstructured text. While recent approaches treat NER and RE as separate tasks requiring distinct models, we introduce GLiNER-Relex, a unified architecture that extends the GLiNER framework to perform both entity recognition and relation extraction in a single model. Our approach leverages a shared bidirectional transformer encoder to jointly represent text, entity type labels, and relation type labels, enabling zero-shot extraction of arbitrary entity and relation types specified at inference time. GLiNER-Relex constructs entity pair representations from recognized spans and scores them against relation type embeddings using a dedicated relation scoring module. We evaluate our model on four standard relation extraction benchmarks: CoNLL04, DocRED, FewRel, and CrossRE, and demonstrate competitive performance against both specialized relation extraction models and large language models, while maintaining the computational efficiency characteristic of the GLiNER family. The model is released as an open-source Python package with a simple inference API that allows users to specify arbitrary entity and relation type labels at inference time and obtain both entities and relation triplets in a single call. All models and code are publicly available.