Polyglot or Not? Measuring Multilingual Encyclopedic Knowledge in Foundation Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13675v2
• Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2023 01:54:34 GMT
• Title: Polyglot or Not? Measuring Multilingual Encyclopedic Knowledge in Foundation Models
• Authors: Tim Schott, Daniel Furman, and Shreshta Bhat
• Abstract summary: We assess the ability of foundation models to recall encyclopedic knowledge across a wide range of linguistic contexts. We produce a 20-language dataset that contains 303k factual associations paired with counterfactuals. We evaluate 5 models in a multilingual test, and benchmark a diverse set of 24 models in an English-only test.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In this work, we assess the ability of foundation models to recall encyclopedic knowledge across a wide range of linguistic contexts. To support this, we: 1) produce a 20-language dataset that contains 303k factual associations paired with counterfactuals, 2) evaluate 5 models in a multilingual test, and 3) benchmark a diverse set of 24 models in an English-only test. Meta's LLaMA achieves the highest scores in both multilingual and English-only evaluations. Yet, an analysis of LLaMA's errors reveals significant limitations in its ability to recall facts in languages other than English, plus difficulties related to the location and gender of fact subjects. Overall, our findings suggest that today's foundation models are far from polyglots.

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