Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis

Understand

In recent years, large language models (e.g., Open AI's GPT-4, Meta's LLaMa, Google's PaLM) have become the dominant approach for building AI systems to analyze and generate language online.

• However, the automated systems that increasingly mediate our interactions online -- such as chatbots, content moderation systems, and search engines -- are primarily designed for and work far more effectively in English than in the world's other 7,000 languages.
• Recently, researchers and technology companies have attempted to extend the capabilities of large language models into languages other than English by building what are called multilingual language models.
• In this paper, we explain how these multilingual language models work and explore their capabilities and limits.