arXiv Computation and Language

Lost in Translation: Measuring the Effect of Non-Native English on End User Performance of Large Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Investigating the Influence of Prompt and Response Languages on LLM Content Generation

The paper investigates how the language of prompts and responses affects large language model (LLM) outputs. Using five models and 68 non‑translation questions, the authors compare English‑to‑English, English‑to‑Norwegian, Norwegian‑to‑Norwegian, and Norwegian‑to‑English conditions, yielding 1,348 responses after filtering. They find that prompt language strongly influences response length—Norwegian prompts shorten English outputs by ~37 % and English prompts shorten Norwegian outputs by ~41 %—while semantic similarity remains high across conditions.

By Thi Thanh Nhan Nguyen, Mai Khoi Tieu, Michael A. Riegler, P{\aa}l Halvorsen, Thu Nguyen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

An Analysis of Training-Free Self-Reported Confidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models’ self-reported confidence is meaningful without additional training. By evaluating three training‑free signals—direct verbalization, post‑hoc probability estimates, and agreement across multiple generations—on 100 TriviaQA questions, the authors find that direct verbalization alone achieves high AUROC scores (0.956 and 0.937) for correctness prediction, while agreement-based methods perform noticeably worse. Re‑eliciting confidence for the same answers shows modest score shifts and occasional decision flips, and an audit of biography claims reveals only a small confidence gap between supported and contradicted statements.

By Lukas Meyer, Sofia Rossi, Wei Chen, Thomas Laurent, Yiming Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.

By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

How Human-Like Are Large Language Models? A Register-Aware Linguistic Evaluation Framework

The paper introduces a register-aware framework to evaluate how human-like large language models (LLMs) are, focusing on linguistic feature distributions rather than factual correctness. It uses Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and 67 Biber lexico‑grammatical features to compare LLM‑generated texts with human reference corpora across different registers. Experiments on seven instruction‑tuned, open‑source models across five English datasets show that all LLMs deviate from human baselines, with closeness to human language varying by register and not by model size.

By Bj\"orn Nieth, Marianna Gracheva, Michaela Mahlberg, Bjoern Eskofier, Emmanuelle Salin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Beyond WER: Entity and Disfluency Recall in Accented Conversational ASR

The paper introduces a three‑stage pipeline to improve accented conversational ASR for speakers from India, Indonesia, and Latin America. It uses heuristic SQL filters to curate entity‑rich training data, regional LoRA adapters fine‑tuned on Qwen2.5‑Omni‑3B to generate both verbatim and corrected transcripts, and a six‑category error taxonomy validated by an LLM judge. The approach raises entity recall to 80‑85% and filler recall to 76‑86%, while keeping WER low (6‑10%) and outperforming Whisper and a commercial ASR on entity recall.

By Fiza Husain, Ankit Pandey, Yash Singh