Can large language models (LLMs) recognize link specifications (LS)? We hypothesize that LS can be considered a low-resource language. In this project, we tackle the problem of automating the generation of LS from natural language (NL) using LLMs, a task we refer to as NL2LS.
NL2LS is a novel framework that automates the generation of link specifications (LS) from English and German natural language inputs using LLMs.
We address this task using:
- Rule-based methods (regex-based)
 - Zero-shot learning via prompting
 - Supervised fine-tuning of LLMs
 
We experimented with the following model families:
- T5: Encoder-Decoder architecture
 - LLaMA-3: Decoder-only architecture
 - LOLA: Decoder with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers
 
We also evaluated GPT and Mistral models during early development.
However, due to their architectural similarity to LLaMA (i.e., decoder-only), and to avoid redundancy, we decided not to include them in the final experiments.
We used and extended multiple benchmark datasets:
| Dataset | Description | 
|---|---|
| LIMES-Silver | Auto-generated NL–LS pairs | 
| LIMES-Annotated | Human-verified LS verbalizations | 
| SILK-Annotated | Based on SILK link discovery framework | 
| LIMES-Geo-Temporal | Contains geospatial and temporal LSs | 
| German Counterparts | Translations of NLs into German | 
We evaluated all models using:
- BLEU
 - METEOR
 - ChrF++
 - TER
 
- LOLA and LLaMA (fine-tuned) achieved BLEU scores up to 98.8 on English datasets.
 - LOLA showed excellent generalization, with >95 BLEU on German test sets.
 
- Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
- Python ≥ 3.8
- torch ≥ 1.7.0
To run NL2LS locally or train/fine-tune models, download the NL2LS repository.
Recommended: Create a virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
Install dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt
