Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Sense

View a PDF of the paper titled Thank You, Stingray: Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Sense, by Samuel Cahyawijaya and Ruochen Zhang and Holy Lovenia and Jan Christian Blaise Cruz and Elisa Gilbert and Hiroki Nomoto and Alham Fikri Aji

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Abstract:Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence, but concerns arise regarding their reliability beyond English. This study addresses the gap in cross-lingual semantic evaluation by introducing a novel benchmark for cross-lingual sense disambiguation, StingrayBench. In this paper, we demonstrate using false friends — words that are orthographically similar but have completely different meanings in two languages — as a possible approach to pinpoint the limitation of cross-lingual sense disambiguation in LLMs. We collect false friends in four language pairs, namely Indonesian-Malay, Indonesian-Tagalog, Chinese-Japanese, and English-German; and challenge LLMs to distinguish the use of them in context. In our analysis of various models, we observe they tend to be biased toward higher-resource languages. We also propose new metrics for quantifying the cross-lingual sense bias and comprehension based on our benchmark. Our work contributes to developing more diverse and inclusive language modeling, promoting fairer access for the wider multilingual community.