Many people asked me about the GLi* evaluation tree, and this post is all about it.
Actually, the story starts before GLiNER.
In 2022–2023, Chinese research teams and international collaborators explored several complementary approaches. UniMC (2022) framed zero-shot classification as multiple-choice prediction, encoding text and candidate labels together. USM (2023) matched schemas with text through token-level links, unifying entity, relation and event extraction. UniEX (2023) combined span detection, classification and relation extraction within one schema-driven extraction framework.
On October 2023, Knowledgator published “As GPT4 but for token classification”, showing prompt-guided token classification for NER, question answering, relation extraction and other tasks.
In November 2023, Urchade Zaratiana, and colleagues introduced GLiNER, using a bidirectional encoder to match text spans with entity labels supplied at inference time. Trained on the UniversalNER team’s Pile-NER dataset, it reported strong zero-shot NER results against the evaluated LLM baselines. I was excited about it, subsequently joined its development, and continue to co-maintain the project.
In April 2024, Urchade and colleagues introduced GraphER, a related research direction that models entity and relation extraction jointly through graph structure.
That June, Mykhailo Shtopko and I introduced GLiNER multi-task, extending the approach to question answering, summarization, and relation extraction. Our team also released GLiClass and bi/poly-encoder variants in 2024.
In 2025, Jack Boylan and colleagues introduced GLiREL for zero-shot relation extraction; Robin Armingaud and Romaric Besançon developed GLiDRE. And Urchade and the Fastino team released GLiNER2, combining NER, classification, relation extraction, and structured extraction.
In 2026, our team introduced GLiNER-Relex for joint entity and relation extraction. Fastino continued with GLiNER2.5 in August, adding boundary-based extraction, longer context, and constrained joint decoding.
And this September, we released GLiFormer. It brings entities, relations, classification, PDF processing, and nested records into one framework with a shared encoder. For hierarchical extraction, it grounds values in the source, groups them into records, and predicts their relationships before assembling JSON.
I’m proud of our contribution and grateful to all researchers, contributors, and users helping this ecosystem grow. Looking forward to more exciting contributions from the community.