LLM for Semantic Role Labeling of Emotion Predicates in Russian

Abstract

Semantic role labeling (SRL) for morphologically rich languages, such as Russian, faces significant challenges due to complex case marking systems, free word order, and limited annotated resources. These challenges are particularly acute for emotion predicates, which require specialized linguistic expertise to capture distinctions between roles denoting those who feel, causes and objects of feelings. We propose a novel approach that leverages large language models to address SRL for Russian emotion predicates through few-shot in-context learning combined with predicate-specific instructions. Our method was evaluated on a manually annotated dataset of 169 sentences containing six emotion predicate groups extracted from Russian social media texts. We compared three state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-5 Mini, and DeepSeek V3) against a RuELECTRA-based trained sequence labelling baseline using both exact and partial matching criteria. Claude 3.7 achieved the highest performance with 74.85% F1 score on partial matching, substantially outperforming the baseline (22.67%). For general predicates on FrameBank, our adapted method with GPT-5 Mini reached 85.0% F1 compared to the previous state-of-the-art of 80.1%. The LLM-based approach successfully handles complex linguistic phenomena, including syntactic zeros and multi-word arguments, while requiring minimal manually annotated training data. We demonstrate that LLM-based methods can significantly advance SRL for Russian by reducing dependency on large-scale annotated corpora while achieving competitive performance.