# The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 165 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [SentEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Universal Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05449/) (2018)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05986/) (2020)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12412/) (2019)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00741/) (2019)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10198/) (2023)
- [Directions in Abusive Language Training Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01670/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04925/) (2024)
- [FaBERT: Pre-training BERT on Persian Blogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06617/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. Despite numerous recent studies that examine the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs on various NLP benchmarks, there remains a lack of comprehensive investigation into their ability to understand cross-lingual sociopragmatic meaning (SM), i.e., meaning embedded within social and interactive contexts. This deficiency arises partly from SM not being adequately represented in any of the existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we present SPARROW, an extensive multilingual benchmark specifically designed for SM understanding. SPARROW comprises 169 datasets covering 13 task types across six primary categories (e.g., anti-social language detection, emotion recognition). SPARROW datasets encompass 64 different languages originating from 12 language families representing 16 writing scripts. We evaluate the performance of various multilingual pretrained language models (e.g., mT5) and instruction-tuned LLMs (e.g., BLOOMZ, ChatGPT) on SPARROW through fine-tuning, zero-shot, and/or few-shot learning. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that existing open-source instruction tuned LLMs still struggle to understand SM across various languages, performing close to a random baseline in some cases. We also find that although ChatGPT outperforms many LLMs, it still falls behind task-specific finetuned models with a gap of 12.19 SPARROW score. Our benchmark is available at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/SPARROW