Do LLMs exhibit the same commonsense capabilities across languages?

2025-09-08

AI Summary

This study investigates the consistency of large language models’ (LLMs) commonsense generation capabilities across multilingual settings. Method: We introduce MULTICOM, the first benchmark for multilingual commonsense generation, extending COCO-Tero to English, Spanish, Dutch, and Valencian—including low-resource variants—and systematically evaluate prominent open-source models (LLaMA, Qwen, Gemma, EuroLLM, Salamandra) using a tripartite evaluation framework combining automated metrics, judge models (Prometheus/JudgeLM), and human annotation, while quantifying contextual support effects per language. Contribution/Results: Results reveal strong performance disparities: models achieve highest accuracy on English, with substantial degradation on low-resource languages; context augmentation yields only marginal gains. Our work identifies critical bottlenecks in current multilingual commonsense reasoning and establishes MULTICOM as a novel, fair, fine-grained benchmark for cross-lingual capability assessment, supported by empirical evidence.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Common-Sense Reasoning

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

This paper explores the multilingual commonsense generation abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate this investigation, we introduce MULTICOM, a novel benchmark that extends the COCOTEROS dataset to four languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, and Valencian. The task involves generating a commonsensical sentence that includes a given triplet of words. We evaluate a range of open-source LLMs, including LLaMA, Qwen, Gemma, EuroLLM, and Salamandra, on this benchmark. Our evaluation combines automatic metrics, LLM-as-a-judge approaches (using Prometheus and JudgeLM), and human annotations. Results consistently show superior performance in English, with significantly lower performance in less-resourced languages. While contextual support yields mixed results, it tends to benefit underrepresented languages. These findings underscore the current limitations of LLMs in multilingual commonsense generation. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/gplsi/MULTICOM.

Problem

• Evaluating multilingual commonsense generation in LLMs
• Assessing performance gaps across resource-rich and low-resource languages
• Testing contextual support effectiveness for underrepresented languages

Innovation

• Multilingual benchmark extension for commonsense evaluation
• Combined automatic and human evaluation methodologies
• Contextual support analysis for underrepresented languages