We evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models in multilingual settings. We introduce the Multilingual Grade School Math (MGSM) benchmark, by manually translating 250 grade-school math problems from the GSM8K dataset (Cobbe et al., 2021) into ten typologically diverse languages. We find that the ability to solve MGSM problems via chain-of-thought prompting emerges with increasing model scale, and that models have strikingly strong multilingual reasoning abilities, even in underrepresented languages such as Bengali and Swahili. Finally, we show that the multilingual reasoning abilities of language models extend to other tasks such as commonsense reasoning and word-in-context semantic judgment. The MGSM benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.
@article{arxiv.2210.03057,
title = {Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners},
author = {Freda Shi and Mirac Suzgun and Markus Freitag and Xuezhi Wang and Suraj Srivats and Soroush Vosoughi and Hyung Won Chung and Yi Tay and Sebastian Ruder and Denny Zhou and Dipanjan Das and Jason Wei},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03057},
year = {2022}
}