Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages

Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Fuxuan Wei, Shijue Huang, Wanxiang Che


Abstract
Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention. Specifically, zero-shot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt “Let’s think step by step!”. Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development. In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages. Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) task-specific solver prompting. The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task. In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.163
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2695–2709
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.163
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.163
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Fuxuan Wei, Shijue Huang, and Wanxiang Che. 2023. Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2695–2709, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages (Qin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.163.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.163.mp4