Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers

Ruochen Zhang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Genta Winata, Alham Aji


Abstract
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great capabilities in a wide range of tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance through zero-shot or few-shot prompting methods. While there have been extensive studies on their abilities in monolingual tasks, the investigation of their potential in the context of code-switching (CSW), the practice of alternating languages within an utterance, remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of various multilingual LLMs, benchmarking their performance across four tasks: sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification. Our results indicate that despite multilingual LLMs exhibiting promising outcomes in certain tasks using zero or few-shot prompting, they still underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. We argue that current “multilingualism’ in LLMs does not inherently imply proficiency with code-switching texts, calling for future research to bridge this discrepancy.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.774
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:
12567–12582
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.774
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.774
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruochen Zhang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Genta Winata, and Alham Aji. 2023. Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12567–12582, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.774.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.774.mp4