F-LoRA-QA: Finetuning LLaMA Models with Low-Rank Adaptation for French Botanical Question Generation and Answering

Ayoub Nainia, Régine Vignes-Lebbe, Hajar Mousannif, Jihad Zahir


Abstract
Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs), most question-answering (QA) systems remain English-centric and poorly suited to domain-specific scientific texts. This linguistic and domain bias poses a major challenge in botany, where a substantial portion of knowledge is documented in French. We introduce F-LoRA-QA, a fine-tuned LLaMA-based pipeline for French botanical QA, leveraging Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for efficient domain adaptation. We construct a specialized dataset of 16,962 question-answer pairs extracted from scientific flora descriptions and fine-tune LLaMA models to retrieve structured knowledge from unstructured botanical texts. Expert-based evaluation confirms the linguistic quality and domain relevance of generated answers. Compared to baseline LLaMA models, F-LoRA-QA achieves a 300% BLEU score increase, 70% ROUGE-1 F1 gain, +16.8% BERTScore F1, and Exact Match improvement from 2.01% to 23.57%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of adapting LLMs to low-resource scientific domains and highlight the potential of our approach for automated trait extraction and biodiversity data structuring.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.91
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
787–796
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.91/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ayoub Nainia, Régine Vignes-Lebbe, Hajar Mousannif, and Jihad Zahir. 2025. F-LoRA-QA: Finetuning LLaMA Models with Low-Rank Adaptation for French Botanical Question Generation and Answering. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 787–796, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
F-LoRA-QA: Finetuning LLaMA Models with Low-Rank Adaptation for French Botanical Question Generation and Answering (Nainia et al., RANLP 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.91.pdf