Challenge: Existing studies have shown that large language models can perform a wide variety of language tasks when presented in English.
Approach: They propose a method to evaluate the multilingual capabilities of large language models using a prompt back-translation method to find out how LLMs acquire their multilingual abilities.
Outcome: The proposed method shows that large language models can transfer learned knowledge across different languages, but struggle to provide accurate results in translation-variant tasks.

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ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have led to significant breakthroughs in the field.
Approach: They evaluate ChatGPT over multiple tasks with diverse languages and large datasets to provide more comprehensive information for multilingual NLP applications.
Outcome: The proposed model can process and generate texts for multiple languages due to its multilingual training data.
Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated multilingual capabilities, yet they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora.
Approach: They extend the evaluation to real-world user queries and non-English-centric LLMs . they show that translation into English can boost LLM performance on NLP tasks .
Outcome: The proposed evaluation extends to user queries and non-English-centric LLMs . it shows that translation into English can boost performance on NLP tasks, but not universally optimal .
Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual machine translation (MMT) However, the multilingual translation ability of LLMs remains under-explored.
Approach: They evaluate eight popular LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to determine their performance in multilingual machine translation.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages and cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resourced translation than exemplar in the same language pairs.
Do Large Language Models have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, but many are still English-dominated.
Approach: They propose to use automatic corpus-level metrics to assess lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLMs in a multilingual context.
Outcome: The proposed method improves naturalness of LLMs in target languages without compromising performance on general-purpose benchmarks.
Turning English-centric LLMs Into Polyglots: How Much Multilinguality Is Needed? (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models that target a single language are not seen during finetuning, but are able to respond in multiple languages once deployed in downstream applications.
Approach: They investigate the minimal amount of multilinguality required during finetuning to elicit effective cross-lingual generalisation in English-centric LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model can respond in as few as two to three languages to a user's query in English, but the degree to which a target language is seen during pretraining is limiting.
Evaluating the Elementary Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models with MultiQ (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a global majority of non-English speakers are underrepresented by large language models . however, most open LLMs are limited in their language coverage .
Approach: They propose a silver standard benchmark for basic open-ended question answering with 27.4k test questions across a typologically diverse set of 137 languages.
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Towards Practical and Knowledgeable LLMs for a Multilingual World: A Thesis Proposal (2025.naacl-srw)

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Challenge: a proposed thesis examines the role that multilinguality occupies in the development of practical and knowledgeable LLMs.
Approach: They propose to use multilingual knowledge to improve LLM performance on NLP tasks . they extend the territorial disputes benchmark to retrieval-augmented generation setting .
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How Vocabulary Sharing Facilitates Multilingualism in LLaMA? (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong performance on English tasks, but their performance in other languages is limited.
Approach: They conducted an exhaustive analysis of the multilingual capability of LLMs by examining the performance gap before and after embedding fine-tuning across 101 languages.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the attributes of four quadrants in the model and provides actionable and efficient guidelines for tuning these languages.
7 Points to Tsinghua but 10 Points to ? Assessing Large Language Models in Agentic Multilingual National Bias (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their capabilities in multilingual natural language processing, but studies on risks associated with cross biases are limited to immediate context preferences.
Approach: They investigate multilingual bias in state-of-the-art Large Language Models by analyzing their responses to decision-making tasks across multiple languages.
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LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent multilingual models support limited number of human languages due to lack of training data for low resource languages.
Approach: They propose a multilingual multilingual LLM that scales to 100 languages . they use a human feedback dataset and a data set to perform multilingual instruction tuning .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms its peers on five multilingual benchmarks.

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