Do Multilingual Language Models Think Better in English?

Understand

Translate-test is a popular technique to improve the performance of multilingual language models.

• This approach works by translating the input into English using an external machine translation system, and running inference over the translated input.
• However, these improvements can be attributed to the use of a separate translation system, which is typically trained on large amounts of parallel data not seen by the language model.
• In this work, we introduce a new approach called self-translate, which overcomes the need of an external translation system by leveraging the few-shot translation capabilities of multilingual language models.