{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/evaluating-the-elementary-multilingual","title":"Evaluating the Elementary Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models with MultiQ","arxiv_id":"2403.03814","date":"2024-03-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Carolin Holtermann","Paul Röttger","Timm Dill","Anne Lauscher"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) need to serve everyone, including a global majority of non-English speakers. However, most LLMs today, and open LLMs in particular, are often intended for use in just English (e.g. Llama2, Mistral) or a small handful of high-resource languages (e.g. Mixtral, Qwen). Recent research shows that, despite limits in their intended use, people prompt LLMs in many different languages. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the basic multilingual capabilities of state-of-the-art open LLMs beyond their intended use. For this purpose, we introduce MultiQ, a new silver standard benchmark for basic open-ended question answering with 27.4k test questions across a typologically diverse set of 137 languages. With MultiQ, we evaluate language fidelity, i.e. whether models respond in the prompted language, and question answering accuracy. All LLMs we test respond faithfully and/or accurately for at least some languages beyond their intended use. Most models are more accurate when they respond faithfully. However, differences across models are large, and there is a long tail of languages where models are neither accurate nor faithful. We explore differences in tokenization as a potential explanation for our findings, identifying possible correlations that warrant further investigation.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03814v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.03814v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"evaluating-the-elementary-multilingual","repo_url":"https://github.com/paul-rottger/multiq","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"open-question","task_name":"Open-Ended Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2403.03814","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2403.03814"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/paul-rottger/multiq","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"2d8a331b5413b83c","entry":"merge_with_wals_data","repo":"paul-rottger/multiq","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/1_translate/WALS_data_merge.py","file_url":"https://github.com/paul-rottger/multiq/blob/HEAD/src/1_translate/WALS_data_merge.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"CC-BY-4.0","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2d8a331b5413b83c"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}