Understanding 6G through Language Models: A Case Study on LLM-aided Structured Entity Extraction in Telecom Domain

TL;DR

This paper introduces TeleSEE, a novel language model-based method for extracting structured telecom entities to enhance 6G network understanding, demonstrating improved accuracy and processing speed over baselines.

Contribution

It presents a new hierarchical decoding approach and token-efficient representation for telecom entity extraction, tailored for 6G knowledge understanding.

Findings

TeleSEE outperforms baseline methods in accuracy.

TeleSEE achieves 5 to 9 times faster processing speed.

The 6GTech dataset enables domain-specific evaluation.

Abstract

Knowledge understanding is a foundational part of envisioned 6G networks to advance network intelligence and AI-native network architectures. In this paradigm, information extraction plays a pivotal role in transforming fragmented telecom knowledge into well-structured formats, empowering diverse AI models to better understand network terminologies. This work proposes a novel language model-based information extraction technique, aiming to extract structured entities from the telecom context. The proposed telecom structured entity extraction (TeleSEE) technique applies a token-efficient representation method to predict entity types and attribute keys, aiming to save the number of output tokens and improve prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, TeleSEE involves a hierarchical parallel decoding method, improving the standard encoder-decoder architecture by integrating additional prompting and decoding strategies into entity extraction tasks. In addition, to better evaluate the performance of the proposed technique in the telecom domain, we further designed a dataset named 6GTech, including 2390 sentences and 23747 words from more than 100 6G-related technical publications. Finally, the experiment shows that the proposed TeleSEE method achieves higher accuracy than other baseline techniques, and also presents 5 to 9 times higher sample processing speed.