WojoodOntology: Ontology-Driven LLM Prompting for Unified Information Extraction Tasks

AbstractInformation Extraction tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction are often developed using diverse tagsets and annotation guidelines. This presents major challenges for model generalization, cross-dataset evaluation, tool interoperability, and broader industry adoption. To address these issues, we propose an information extraction ontology, , which covers a wide range of named entity types and relations. serves as a semantic mediation framework that facilitates alignment across heterogeneous tagsets and annotation guidelines. We propose two ontology-based mapping methods: (i) as a set of mapping rules for uni-directional tagset alignment; and (ii) as ontology-based prompting, which incorporates the ontology concepts directly into prompts, enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform more effective and bi-directional mappings. Our experiments show a 15% improvement in out-of-domain mapping accuracy when using ontology-based prompting compared to rule-based methods. Furthermore, is aligned with Schema.org and Wikidata, enabling interoperability with knowledge graphs and facilitating broader industry adoption. The is open source and available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood.