Unlocking the Non-Native Language Context Limitation: Native Language Prompting Facilitates Knowledge Elicitation

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) struggle to answer questions posed in non-dominant languages, even though they have already acquired the relevant knowledge from their dominant language corpus. In contrast, human multilinguals can overcome this issue by invoking the relatively rich knowledge acquired from native language texts through Positive Native Language Transfer (PNLT). Inspired by this, we analogize the dominant language of MLLMs to the native language of human multilinguals, and propose Native Language Prompting (NatLan) to simulate the PNLT observed in human multilinguals. It explicitly creates native language contexts for MLLMs to facilitate the elicitation of the rich native language knowledge during question-answering, unlocking the limitations imposed by non-native language contexts on the effective application of knowledge. By employing multi-MLLM collaboration, NatLan reduces the workload on each MLLM in simulating PNLT and refines semantic transfer. On the C-Eval benchmark, NatLan provides up to a 10.1% average accuracy improvement and up to a 5.0% increase in the hard-level subset across five MLLMs, surpassing all top-notch related methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/AnonyNLP/NatLan.

A Higher-Order Semantic Dependency Parser

Higher-order features bring significant accuracy gains in semantic dependency parsing. However, modeling higher-order features with exact inference is NP-hard. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to be an effective tool for solving NP-hard problems with approximate inference in many graph learning tasks. Inspired by the success of GNNs, we investigate building a higher-order semantic dependency parser by applying GNNs. Instead of explicitly extracting higher-order features from intermediate parsing graphs, GNNs aggregate higher-order information concisely by stacking multiple GNN layers. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art parser on the SemEval 2015 Task 18 English datasets.