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arXiv · 2412.08392

The Roles of English in Evaluating Multilingual Language Models

Wessel Poelman·Miryam de Lhoneux
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Abstract

Multilingual natural language processing is getting increased attention, with numerous models, benchmarks, and methods being released for many languages. English is often used in multilingual evaluation to prompt language models (LMs), mainly to overcome the lack of instruction tuning data in other languages. In this position paper, we lay out two roles of English in multilingual LM evaluations: as an interface and as a natural language. We argue that these roles have different goals: task performance versus language understanding. This discrepancy is highlighted with examples from datasets and evaluation setups. Numerous works explicitly use English as an interface to boost task performance. We recommend to move away from this imprecise method and instead focus on furthering language understanding.

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Wessel Poelman, Miryam de Lhoneux. 2024-12-11. The Roles of English in Evaluating Multilingual Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08392

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