@inproceedings{peter-etal-2026-mind,
title = "Mind the Gap... or Not? How Translation Errors and Evaluation Details Skew Multilingual Results",
author = "Peter, Jan-Thorsten and
Vilar, David and
Domhan, Tobias and
Malkin, Dan and
Freitag, Markus",
editor = "Mille, Simon and
Gehrmann, Sebastian and
Schmidtov{\'a}, Patr{\'i}cia and
Du{\v{s}}ek, Ond{\v{r}}ej and
Fadaee, Marzieh and
Lo, Kyle and
Santus, Enrico and
Stanovsky, Gabriel",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics ({GEM})",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.22/",
pages = "191--204",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-423-1",
abstract = "Most current large language models (LLMs) support a wide variety of languages in addition to English, including high-resource languages (e.g. German, Chinese, French), as well as low-resource ones (e.g. Swahili, Telugu). In addition they have shown impressive capabilities in different domains, like coding, science and math. In this paper, taking math as an example domain, we study the performance of different LLMs across languages. Experimental results show that there exists a non-negligible and consistent gap in the performance of the models across languages. Interestingly, and somewhat against expectations, the gap exists for both high- and low-resource languages. These results should impact further research into cross-lingual capability generalization for next generation LLMs. Or they would, if it weren{'}t for the fact that they are false. By analyzing one of the standard multilingual math benchmarks (MGSM), we determine that several translation errors are present in the data. Furthermore, the lack of standardized answer extraction from LLM outputs further influences the final results. We propose a method for semi-automatic quality assurance to address the first issue at scale, and give recommendations to address the second one. Combining these two approaches we show that the aforementioned language gap mostly disappears, leading to completely different conclusions from our research. We additionally release the corrected dataset to the community."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Mind the Gap... or Not? How Translation Errors and Evaluation Details Skew Multilingual Results
%A Peter, Jan-Thorsten
%A Vilar, David
%A Domhan, Tobias
%A Malkin, Dan
%A Freitag, Markus
%Y Mille, Simon
%Y Gehrmann, Sebastian
%Y Schmidtová, Patrícia
%Y Dušek, Ondřej
%Y Fadaee, Marzieh
%Y Lo, Kyle
%Y Santus, Enrico
%Y Stanovsky, Gabriel
%S Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-423-1
%F peter-etal-2026-mind
%X Most current large language models (LLMs) support a wide variety of languages in addition to English, including high-resource languages (e.g. German, Chinese, French), as well as low-resource ones (e.g. Swahili, Telugu). In addition they have shown impressive capabilities in different domains, like coding, science and math. In this paper, taking math as an example domain, we study the performance of different LLMs across languages. Experimental results show that there exists a non-negligible and consistent gap in the performance of the models across languages. Interestingly, and somewhat against expectations, the gap exists for both high- and low-resource languages. These results should impact further research into cross-lingual capability generalization for next generation LLMs. Or they would, if it weren’t for the fact that they are false. By analyzing one of the standard multilingual math benchmarks (MGSM), we determine that several translation errors are present in the data. Furthermore, the lack of standardized answer extraction from LLM outputs further influences the final results. We propose a method for semi-automatic quality assurance to address the first issue at scale, and give recommendations to address the second one. Combining these two approaches we show that the aforementioned language gap mostly disappears, leading to completely different conclusions from our research. We additionally release the corrected dataset to the community.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.22/
%P 191-204
Markdown (Informal)
[Mind the Gap... or Not? How Translation Errors and Evaluation Details Skew Multilingual Results](https://aclanthology.org/2026.gem-main.22/) (Peter et al., GEM 2026)
ACL