Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04792v1
• Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 14:01:11 GMT
• Title: Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?
• Authors: Yotam Intrator, Matan Halfon, Roman Goldenberg, Reut Tsarfaty, Matan Eyal, Ehud Rivlin, Yossi Matias, Natalia Aizenberg
• Abstract summary: This study re-evaluates the need for pre-translation in the context of PaLM2 models. PaLM2-L consistently outperforms pre-translation in 94 out of 108 languages.
• Score: 17.828943682809882
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models hold significant promise in multilingual applications. However, inherent biases stemming from predominantly English-centric pre-training have led to the widespread practice of pre-translation, i.e., translating non-English inputs to English before inference, leading to complexity and information loss. This study re-evaluates the need for pre-translation in the context of PaLM2 models (Anil et al., 2023), which have been established as highly performant in multilingual tasks. We offer a comprehensive investigation across 108 languages and 6 diverse benchmarks, including open-end generative tasks, which were excluded from previous similar studies. Our findings challenge the pre-translation paradigm established in prior research, highlighting the advantages of direct inference in PaLM2. Specifically, PaLM2-L consistently outperforms pre-translation in 94 out of 108 languages. These findings pave the way for more efficient and effective multilingual applications, alleviating the limitations associated with pre-translation and unlocking linguistic authenticity.

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