---
license: mit
language:
- en
tags:
- token-classification
- text-segmentation
- situation-entity-segmentation
- xlm-roberta
- crf
base_model: FacebookAI/xlm-roberta-large
---

# XLM-RoBERTa-large + CRF for Situation-Entity Segmentation

[Paper](https://aclanthology.org/2026.law-main.8/) | [Code](https://github.com/coling-unia/sitent-segmenter-law2026)

Fine-tuned [XLM-RoBERTa-large](https://huggingface.co/FacebookAI/xlm-roberta-large) with a linear classifier and a CRF output layer for **situation-entity segmentation**.

The model assigns BI(O) tags (`B-EDU`, `I-EDU`) to each token, marking the boundaries and spans of situation-entity segments — contiguous clause-level segments that describe a single situation type.

We use the multilingual version of RoBERTa to improve possible zero-shot transfer to situation segmentation in other language varieties.

## Usage

### Requirements

```bash
pip install transformers torch pytorch-crf
```

spaCy is not a hard dependency, but is recommended for sentence splitting (matching the training setup):

```bash
pip install spacy && python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
```

### Loading the model

```python
from transformers import AutoConfig, AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

config    = AutoConfig.from_pretrained("coling-unia/situation-entity-segmenter", trust_remote_code=True)
model     = AutoModel.from_pretrained("coling-unia/situation-entity-segmenter", trust_remote_code=True)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("FacebookAI/xlm-roberta-large")

model.eval()
```

### Inference

The model was trained on spaCy-tokenised, sentence-split input (`en_core_web_sm`), so inference should follow the same setup. Split your input text into sentences using spaCy first, then call `model.predict_text(words, tokenizer)` with the word tokens for each sentence:

```python
import spacy

nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")

text    = "The cat sat on the mat. It looked around the room."
results = []

for sent in nlp(text).sents:
    words = [token.text for token in sent]
    results.extend(model.predict_text(words, tokenizer))

for word, tag in results:
    print(f"{word:20s} {tag}")
```

`B-EDU` marks the start of a new situation-entity segment; `I-EDU` marks its continuation; `O` marks tokens outside any segment.

## Architecture

```
XLM-RoBERTa-large encoder  →  Linear(1024 → 3)  →  CRF(3 tags)
```

- **Encoder:** `FacebookAI/xlm-roberta-large` 
- **Classifier:** single linear layer mapping the encoder's hidden states to 3 tag logits
- **Decoder:** Viterbi decoding via a linear-chain CRF (`pytorch-crf`)
- **Labels:** `B-EDU` (0), `I-EDU` (1)

## Training Data

Fine-tuned on the situation entity annotated corpus from:

> Annemarie Friedrich, Alexis Palmer and Manfred Pinkal. **Situation entity types: automatic classification of clause-level aspect.** ACL 2016. ([GitHub](https://github.com/annefried/sitent))

The dataset is licensed under the [Apache License 2.0](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). 
Per the terms of the Apache 2.0 license, notice is hereby given that these weights represent a modified derivative work based on that data.

The corpus contains English text with clause-level situation-entity annotations. The standard train/dev/test split from the original paper is used.

## Training Details

| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | `FacebookAI/xlm-roberta-large` |
| Learning rate | 4e-5 |
| Epochs (max) | 20 |
| Batch size | 64 |
| Weight decay | 0.001 |
| Early stopping | patience 3 (B-EDU F1 on dev) |
| Precision | fp16 |

Please find further training details in our code on GitHub.

## Results

Evaluated on the held-out test set. The table shows the best single run and the mean ± std across 5 random seeds for the best hyperparameter configuration (lr=4e-5, wd=0.001). A full grid search over 4 configurations × 5 seeds (20 runs total) was conducted; all configurations achieved similar B-EDU F1 in the range 0.902–0.904.

| Metric | Best run | Mean ± std (5 seeds) |
|---|---|---|
| B-EDU F1 | **0.907** | 0.904 ± 0.002 |
| B-EDU Precision | 0.901 | 0.898 ± 0.010 |
| B-EDU Recall | 0.914 | 0.911 ± 0.009 |
| WindowDiff (↓) | **0.075** | 0.077 ± 0.002 |
| Exact Match (sentence) | 0.753 | 0.742 ± 0.007 |

WindowDiff (Pevzner & Hearst, 2002) measures boundary-level segmentation quality within a sliding window of half the average reference segment length (lower is better). Exact Match is the fraction of sentences whose full tag sequence is predicted correctly (sentence level).

## Limitations

- Trained and evaluated on ~40.000 situation English segments.
- Performance may vary on out-of-domain text.
- Sub-token sequences longer than 512 tokens need to be chunked before inference - regular sentences should be shorter, though.

## Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the scientific support and HPC resources provided by the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) of the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) under the NHR project v110ee. NHR funding is provided by federal and Bavarian state authorities. NHR@FAU hardware is partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – 440719683.

## Citation

Please cite our paper when using the model:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{schmuck-etal-2026-cross,
    title = "Cross-Linguistic Situation Entity Segmentation for Discourse Analysis in Diachronic {E}nglish and {G}erman Text",
    author = {Schm{\"u}ck, Hanna  and
      Urban, Veronika  and
      Kr{\"u}ckl, Xaver  and
      Zeman, Sonja  and
      Claridge, Claudia  and
      Friedrich, Annemarie},
    editor = "Liu, Yang Janet  and
      Gessler, Luke",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th Linguistic Annotation Workshop ({LAW} {XX})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.law-main.8/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.law-main.8",
    pages = "95--112",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-404-0",
    abstract = "Situation Entity (SE) segmentation identifies clause-like discourse units focusing on verb constellations. While SE segmentation has been applied to contemporary English as a subtask of SE annotation, systematic guidelines for syntactically ambiguous constructions remain underspecified. We present principled SE segmentation guidelines for contemporary and historical varieties of English and German. Our inter-annotator agreement studies on Late Modern English (1700{--}1900) and New High German (1650{--}1900) corpora demonstrate substantial agreement. Using the existing SitEnt corpus in contemporary English, we implement a new automatic segmenter based on XLM-RoBERTa. Our evaluation examines cross-variety and cross-lingual generalization, demonstrating challenges both for human annotation efforts and in transferring segmenters trained on contemporary English to historical varieties. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/coling-unia/sitent-segmenter-law2026."
}
```

Please also cite the original annotation data paper:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{friedrich-etal-2016-situation,
    title = "Situation entity types: automatic classification of clause-level aspect",
    author = "Friedrich, Annemarie  and
      Palmer, Alexis  and
      Pinkal, Manfred",
    editor = "Erk, Katrin  and
      Smith, Noah A.",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2016",
    address = "Berlin, Germany",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/P16-1166/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P16-1166",
    pages = "1757--1768"
}
```
Cheers!