Knowledge Graphs represent real-world entities and the relationships between them. Multilingual Knowledge Graph Construction (mKGC) refers to the task of automatically constructing or predicting missing entities and links for knowledge graphs in a multilingual setting. In this work, we reformulate the mKGC task as a Question Answering (QA) task and introduce mRAKL: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system to perform mKGC. We achieve this by using the head entity and linking relation in a question, and having our model predict the tail entity as an answer. Our experiments focus primarily on two low-resourced languages: Tigrinya and Amharic. We experiment with using higher-resourced languages, Arabic and English, to utilize cross-lingual transfer for mKGC. With a BM25 retriever, we find that the RAG-based approach improves performance over a no-context setting. Further, our ablation studies show that with an idealized retrieval system, mRAKL improves accuracy by up to 4.92 and 8.79 percentage points for Tigrinya and Amharic, respectively.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases. Much like speakers who might produce awkward expressions when learning a second language, LLMs often generate unnatural outputs in non-English languages, reflecting English-centric patterns in both vocabulary and grammar. Despite the importance of this issue, the naturalness of multilingual LLM outputs has received limited attention. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing novel automatic corpus-level metrics to assess the lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLM outputs in a multilingual context. Using our new metrics, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on a curated benchmark in French and Chinese, revealing a tendency towards English-influenced patterns. To mitigate this issue, we also propose a simple and effective alignment method to improve the naturalness of an LLM in a target language and domain, achieving consistent improvements in naturalness without compromising the performance on general-purpose benchmarks. Our work highlights the importance of developing multilingual metrics, resources and methods for the new wave of multilingual LLMs.

Translating text that contains entity names is a challenging task, as cultural-related references can vary significantly across languages. These variations may also be caused by transcreation, an adaptation process that entails more than transliteration and word-for-word translation. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-cultural translation on two fronts: (i) we introduce XC-Translate, the first large-scale, manually-created benchmark for machine translation that focuses on text that contains potentially culturally-nuanced entity names, and (ii) we propose KG-MT, a novel end-to-end method to integrate information from a multilingual knowledge graph into a neural machine translation model by leveraging a dense retrieval mechanism. Our experiments and analyses show that current machine translation systems and large language models still struggle to translate texts containing entity names, whereas KG-MT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, obtaining a 129% and 62% relative improvement compared to NLLB-200 and GPT-4, respectively.