Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?
<|reference_start|>Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?: 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.<|reference_end|>
@article{intrator2024breaking,
    title={Breaking the Language Barrier: Can Direct Inference Outperform
  Pre-Translation in Multilingual LLM Applications?},
    author={Yotam Intrator, Matan Halfon, Roman Goldenberg, Reut Tsarfaty, Matan
  Eyal, Ehud Rivlin, Yossi Matias, Natalia Aizenberg},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04792},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.04792},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.LG}
}