LLM-FuncMapper: Function Identification for Interpreting Complex Clauses
  in Building Codes via LLM
Zhe Zheng Ke-Yin Chen Xin-Yu Cao Xin-Zheng Lu Jia-Rui Lin
As a vital stage of automated rule checking (ARC), rule interpretation of
regulatory texts requires considerable effort. However, interpreting regulatory
clauses with implicit properties or complex computational logic is still
challenging due to the lack of domain knowledge and limited expressibility of
conventional logic representations. Thus, LLM-FuncMapper, an approach to
identifying predefined functions needed to interpret various regulatory clauses
based on the large language model (LLM), is proposed. First, by systematically
analysis of building codes, a series of atomic functions are defined to capture
shared computational logics of implicit properties and complex constraints,
creating a database of common blocks for interpreting regulatory clauses. Then,
a prompt template with the chain of thought is developed and further enhanced
with a classification-based tuning strategy, to enable common LLMs for
effective function identification. Finally, the proposed approach is validated
with statistical analysis, experiments, and proof of concept. Statistical
analysis reveals a long-tail distribution and high expressibility of the
developed function database, with which almost 100% of computer-processible
clauses can be interpreted and represented as computer-executable codes.
Experiments show that LLM-FuncMapper achieve promising results in identifying
relevant predefined functions for rule interpretation. Further proof of concept
in automated rule interpretation also demonstrates the possibility of
LLM-FuncMapper in interpreting complex regulatory clauses. To the best of our
knowledge, this study is the first attempt to introduce LLM for understanding
and interpreting complex regulatory clauses, which may shed light on further
adoption of LLM in the construction domain.