Leveraging Knowledge in Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning (CSR) requires the model to be equipped with general world knowledge. While CSR is a language-agnostic process, most comprehensive knowledge sources are in few popular languages, especially English. Thus, it remains unclear how to effectively conduct multilingual commonsense reasoning (XCSR) for various languages. In this work, we propose to utilize English knowledge sources via a translate-retrieve-translate (TRT) strategy. For multilingual commonsense questions and choices, we collect related knowledge via translation and retrieval from the knowledge sources. The retrieved knowledge is then translated into the target language and integrated into a pre-trained multilingual LLM via visible knowledge attention. Then we utilize a diverse of 4 English knowledge sources to provide more comprehensive coverage of knowledge in different formats. Extensive results on the XCSR benchmark demonstrate that TRT with external knowledge can significantly improve multilingual commonsense reasoning in both zero-shot and translate-train settings, outperforming 3.3 and 3.6 points over the previous state-of-the-art on XCSR benchmark datasets (X-CSQA and X-CODAH).