Coupling Local Context and Global Semantic Prototypes via a Hierarchical Architecture for Rhetorical Roles Labeling

Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) assigns a functional role to each sentence in a document and is widely used in legal, medical, and scientific domains. While language models (LMs) achieve strong average performance, they remain unreliable on hard examples, where prediction confidence is low. Existing approaches typically handle uncertainty implicitly and treat labels as discrete identifiers, overlooking the semantic information encoded in label names. We introduce RISE, an inference-time semantic reranking framework that leverages label semantics to refine predictions on hard instances. RISE automatically identifies low-confidence predictions and reranks model outputs using contrastively learned label representations, without retraining or modifying the underlying model. Experiments on eight domain-specific RRL datasets with seven LMs, including encoder-based and causal architectures, show an average gain of +9.15 macro-F1 points on hard examples. For explainability, we further propose manual hardness annotations to study difficulty from both model and human perspectives, revealing a moderate agreement with Cohen's kappa = 0.40.

Court judgments are central to legal practice and jurisprudence, yet discourse analysis of Hong Kong judgments has received limited attention, owing largely to the absence of expert-annotated corpora. We introduce the Hong Kong Judgment Discourse Dataset (HKJudge), the first sentence-level expert-annotated legal discourse corpus. HKJudge includes criminal judgments across all five levels of HK's court hierarchy, comprising $\sim$290k sentences and $\sim$6.5 million tokens, fully annotated by legal linguistics experts. We design a two-tier discourse schema that captures what facts a court finds, how it reasons, and what it rules. At the sentence level, each sentence is assigned one of 26 rhetorical roles. At the span level, sentences are further annotated with three sentencing elements (charge, imprisonment term, fine). Ten legal linguistics annotators produced the annotations with an inter-annotator agreement of $κ= 0.8$. We formulate two tasks on HKJudge, termed rhetorical role classification and legal element extraction, and provide the first benchmark evaluation of four BERT-based models, two open-source LLMs under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, and four commercial LLMs on both tasks. Our work demonstrates the value of sentence-level discourse annotation for modeling the structure of HK judgments and provides a rich data foundation for future work on legal judgment prediction. The HKJudge dataset and code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/HKJudge.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a central natural language processing task for understanding predicate-argument structures within texts and enabling downstream applications. Despite extensive research, comprehensive surveys that critically synthesize the field from a unified perspective remain lacking. This survey makes several contributions beyond organizing existing work. We propose a unified four-dimensional taxonomy that categorizes SRL research along model architectures, syntax feature modeling, application scenarios, and multimodal extensions. We provide a critical analysis of when and why syntactic features help, identifying conditions under which syntax-aided approaches provide consistent gains over syntax-free counterparts. We offer the first systematic treatment of SRL in the era of large language models, examining the complementary roles of LLMs and specialized SRL systems and identifying directions for hybrid approaches. We extend the scope of SRL surveys to cover multimodal settings including visual, video, and speech modalities, and analyze structural differences in evaluation across these modalities. Literature was collected through systematic searches of the ACL Anthology, IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar, covering publications from 2000 to 2025 and applying explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to yield approximately 200 primary references. SRL benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and paradigm modeling approaches are discussed alongside practical applications across domains. Future research directions are analyzed, addressing the evolving role of SRL with large language models and broader NLP impact.