Linguistic Intelligence in Large Language Models for Telecommunications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant advancement in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), demonstrating remarkable capabilities in language generation and other language-centric tasks. Despite their evaluation across a multitude of analytical and reasoning tasks in various scientific domains, a comprehensive exploration of their knowledge and understanding within the realm of natural language tasks in the telecommunications domain is still needed. This study, therefore, seeks to evaluate the knowledge and understanding capabilities of LLMs within this domain. To achieve this, we conduct an exhaustive zero-shot evaluation of four prominent LLMs-Llama-2, Falcon, Mistral, and Zephyr. These models require fewer resources than ChatGPT, making them suitable for resource-constrained environments. Their performance is compared not only with state-of-the-art, fine-tuned models but also with larger LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to extensively evaluate and compare the understanding of LLMs across multiple language-centric tasks in this domain. Our evaluation reveals that zero-shot LLMs can achieve performance levels comparable to the current state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. This indicates that pretraining on extensive text corpora equips LLMs with a degree of specialization, even within the telecommunications domain. We also observe that no single LLM consistently outperforms others, and the performance of different LLMs can fluctuate. Although their performance lags behind fine-tuned models, our findings underscore the potential of LLMs as a valuable resource for understanding various aspects of this field that lack large annotated data.