Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation
Abstract:Multilingual benchmarks are central to evaluating large language models (LLMs) across languages, but they suffer from three issues: exhaustive evaluation scales linearly with the number of languages, automatic translation introduces errors that are easily missed at scale, and some items conflate general and culture-specific knowledge. We address all three with a unified statistical framework, Multilingual-IRT, which extends Item Response Theory with per-language difficulty deviations, split discriminability separating content from language effects, and per-language ability residuals. Fitting Multilingual-IRT on 25 LLMs across 29 languages of MMLU-Pro-X, we show that its fitted parameters support three practical applications: predicting unobserved (item, LLM, language) instances with 11-16% lower binary cross-entropy than the strongest accuracy-based baseline, surfacing candidate translation errors distributed across all 28 non-English languages, whereas accuracy-based baselines concentrate detections in a few languages, and recovering culture-specific items that accuracy-based baselines miss.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.15643 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.15643v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15643
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Generating in the Limit with Infinitely Many Hallucinations
Jun 30
-
Extracting Knowledge from an Arabic-English Machine-Readable Dictionary Using Information Extraction
Jun 30
-
Developmental Trajectories of Situation Modeling and Mentalizing in Transformer Language Models
Jun 30
-
A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training
Jun 30
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.