English

Evaluating Multilingual and Code-Switched Alignment in LLMs via Synthetic Natural Language Inference

Computation and Language 2025-08-21 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in multilingual contexts, yet their capacity for consistent, logically grounded alignment across languages remains underexplored. We present a controlled evaluation framework for multilingual natural language inference (NLI) that generates synthetic, logic-based premise-hypothesis pairs and translates them into a typologically diverse set of languages. This design enables precise control over semantic relations and allows testing in both monolingual and mixed-language (code-switched) conditions. Surprisingly, code-switching does not degrade, and can even improve, performance, suggesting that translation-induced lexical variation may serve as a regularization signal. We validate semantic preservation through embedding-based similarity analyses and cross-lingual alignment visualizations, confirming the fidelity of translated pairs. Our findings expose both the potential and the brittleness of current LLM cross-lingual reasoning, and identify code-switching as a promising lever for improving multilingual robustness. Code available at: https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/nli-stress-testing

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.14735,
  title  = {Evaluating Multilingual and Code-Switched Alignment in LLMs via Synthetic Natural Language Inference},
  author = {Samir Abdaljalil and Erchin Serpedin and Khalid Qaraqe and Hasan Kurban},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.14735},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Under review

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:58:32.441Z