Evaluating Cross-lingual Knowledge Consistency in Code-Mixed vis-a-vis Indian Languages using IndicKLAR

Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali, Aditya Joshi, Akshay Agarwal, Jasabanta Patro


Abstract
Large language models often exhibit a substantial gap between their performance in English and in lower-resourced languages on equivalent knowledge queries—a cross-lingual consistency issue that remains underexplored for Indian languages and their code-mixed counterparts. To study this gap, we introduce IndicKLAR, an Indic extension of the KLAR-CLC benchmark covering 18 of the 22 scheduled Indian languages. For 11 widely used language pairs, we additionally provide code-mixed variants. Both monolingual and code-mixed inputs verified by native speakers. This three-way alignment enables us to examine how knowledge recall consistency varies across English, code-mixed, and native Indian language inputs. Across nine open-weight models, we find that the accuracy gap between native-language and English inputs can reach ∼0.50, while code-mixed inputs substantially reduce this gap, bringing performance within ∼0.05 of English without any model-level intervention. Motivated by this finding, we evaluate several prompting strategies that differ in how explicitly language conversion is exposed: a two-stage translate-then-answer setup, a one-stage joint translation-and-answer prompt, and Translate-in-Thought (TinT)—a single-step strategy in which the model internally converts the input and outputs only the final answer. Across the native → code-mixed → English performance trajectory, we observe a consistent flip point—the transition from incorrect to correct prediction—between the native and code-mixed settings. Notably, this pattern holds both when the code-mixed representation is explicitly provided as input or when the model is prompted to convert internally using TinT.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1655
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
35250–35277
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1655/
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Cite (ACL):
Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali, Aditya Joshi, Akshay Agarwal, and Jasabanta Patro. 2026. Evaluating Cross-lingual Knowledge Consistency in Code-Mixed vis-a-vis Indian Languages using IndicKLAR. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 35250–35277, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Cross-lingual Knowledge Consistency in Code-Mixed vis-a-vis Indian Languages using IndicKLAR (Mazumder et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1655.pdf