Papers › ChatGPT for GTFS: Benchmarking LLMs on GTFS Understanding and Retrieval

ChatGPT for GTFS: Benchmarking LLMs on GTFS Understanding and Retrieval

4 Aug 2023arXiv:2308.02618archive 2025-07-28

Saipraneeth Devunuri, Shirin Qiam, Lewis Lehe

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) standard for publishing transit data is ubiquitous. GTFS being tabular data, with information spread across different files, necessitates specialized tools or packages to retrieve information. Concurrently, the use of Large Language Models(LLMs) for text and information retrieval is growing. The idea of this research is to see if the current widely adopted LLMs (ChatGPT) are able to understand GTFS and retrieve information from GTFS using natural language instructions without explicitly providing information. In this research, we benchmark OpenAI's GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 LLMs which are the backbone of ChatGPT. ChatGPT demonstrates a reasonable understanding of GTFS by answering 59.7% (GPT-3.5-Turbo) and 73.3% (GPT-4) of our multiple-choice questions (MCQ) correctly. Furthermore, we evaluated the LLMs on information extraction tasks using a filtered GTFS feed containing four routes. We found that program synthesis techniques outperformed zero-shot approaches, achieving up to 93% (90%) accuracy for simple queries and 61% (41%) for complex ones using GPT-4 (GPT-3.5-Turbo).

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BenchmarkingInformation RetrievalMultiple-choiceProgram SynthesisRetrieval

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3GPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight Decay

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