Enhancing Function-Calling Capabilities in LLMs: Strategies for Prompt Formats, Data Integration, and Multilingual Translation

Yi-Chang Chen, Po-Chun Hsu, Chan-Jan Hsu, Da-shan Shiu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced autonomous agents, particularly in zero-shot tool usage, also known as function calling. This research delves into enhancing the function-calling capabilities of LLMs by exploring different approaches, including prompt formats for integrating function descriptions, blending function-calling and instruction-following data, introducing a novel Decision Token for conditional prompts, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning, and overcoming multilingual challenges with a translation pipeline. Our key findings and contributions are as follows: (1) Instruction-following data improves both function-calling accuracy and relevance detection. (2) The use of the newly proposed Decision Token, combined with synthetic non-function-call data, enhances relevance detection. (3) A tailored translation pipeline effectively overcomes multilingual limitations, demonstrating significant improvements in Traditional Chinese. These insights highlight the potential for improved function-calling capabilities and multilingual applications in LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-industry.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Weizhu Chen, Yi Yang, Mohammad Kachuee, Xue-Yong Fu
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
99–111
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.9/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi-Chang Chen, Po-Chun Hsu, Chan-Jan Hsu, and Da-shan Shiu. 2025. Enhancing Function-Calling Capabilities in LLMs: Strategies for Prompt Formats, Data Integration, and Multilingual Translation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track), pages 99–111, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Function-Calling Capabilities in LLMs: Strategies for Prompt Formats, Data Integration, and Multilingual Translation (Chen et al., NAACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.9.pdf