CompoST: A Benchmark for Analyzing the Ability of LLMs To Compositionally Interpret Questions in a QALD Setting

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Schmidt, David Maria, Schubert, Raoul, Cimiano, Philipp
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917049848037376
author Schmidt, David Maria
Schubert, Raoul
Cimiano, Philipp
author_facet Schmidt, David Maria
Schubert, Raoul
Cimiano, Philipp
contents Language interpretation is a compositional process, in which the meaning of more complex linguistic structures is inferred from the meaning of their parts. Large language models possess remarkable language interpretation capabilities and have been successfully applied to interpret questions by mapping them to SPARQL queries. An open question is how systematic this interpretation process is. Toward this question, in this paper, we propose a benchmark for investigating to what extent the abilities of LLMs to interpret questions are actually compositional. For this, we generate three datasets of varying difficulty based on graph patterns in DBpedia, relying on Lemon lexica for verbalization. Our datasets are created in a very controlled fashion in order to test the ability of LLMs to interpret structurally complex questions, given that they have seen the atomic building blocks. This allows us to evaluate to what degree LLMs are able to interpret complex questions for which they "understand" the atomic parts. We conduct experiments with models of different sizes using both various prompt and few-shot optimization techniques as well as fine-tuning. Our results show that performance in terms of macro $F_1$ degrades from $0.45$ over $0.26$ down to $0.09$ with increasing deviation from the samples optimized on. Even when all necessary information was provided to the model in the input, the $F_1$ scores do not exceed $0.57$ for the dataset of lowest complexity. We thus conclude that LLMs struggle to systematically and compositionally interpret questions and map them into SPARQL queries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CompoST: A Benchmark for Analyzing the Ability of LLMs To Compositionally Interpret Questions in a QALD Setting
Schmidt, David Maria
Schubert, Raoul
Cimiano, Philipp
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Language interpretation is a compositional process, in which the meaning of more complex linguistic structures is inferred from the meaning of their parts. Large language models possess remarkable language interpretation capabilities and have been successfully applied to interpret questions by mapping them to SPARQL queries. An open question is how systematic this interpretation process is. Toward this question, in this paper, we propose a benchmark for investigating to what extent the abilities of LLMs to interpret questions are actually compositional. For this, we generate three datasets of varying difficulty based on graph patterns in DBpedia, relying on Lemon lexica for verbalization. Our datasets are created in a very controlled fashion in order to test the ability of LLMs to interpret structurally complex questions, given that they have seen the atomic building blocks. This allows us to evaluate to what degree LLMs are able to interpret complex questions for which they "understand" the atomic parts. We conduct experiments with models of different sizes using both various prompt and few-shot optimization techniques as well as fine-tuning. Our results show that performance in terms of macro $F_1$ degrades from $0.45$ over $0.26$ down to $0.09$ with increasing deviation from the samples optimized on. Even when all necessary information was provided to the model in the input, the $F_1$ scores do not exceed $0.57$ for the dataset of lowest complexity. We thus conclude that LLMs struggle to systematically and compositionally interpret questions and map them into SPARQL queries.
title CompoST: A Benchmark for Analyzing the Ability of LLMs To Compositionally Interpret Questions in a QALD Setting
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21257