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.

Due to the recent advances of natural language processing, several works have applied the pre-trained masked language model (MLM) of BERT to the post-correction of speech recognition. However, existing pre-trained models only consider the semantic correction while the phonetic features of words is neglected. The semantic-only post-correction will consequently decrease the performance since homophonic errors are fairly common in Chinese ASR. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to collectively exploit the contextualized representation and the phonetic information between the error and its replacing candidates to alleviate the error rate of Chinese ASR. Our experiment results on real world speech recognition datasets showed that our proposed method has evidently lower CER than the baseline model, which utilized a pre-trained BERT MLM as the corrector.