Just Go Parallel: Improving the Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated impressive translation capabilities even without being explicitly trained on parallel data. This remarkable property has led some to believe that parallel data is no longer necessary for building multilingual LLMs. While some attribute this to the emergent abilities of LLMs due to scale, recent work suggests that it is actually caused by incidental bilingual signals present in the training data. Various methods have been proposed to maximize the utility of parallel data to enhance the multilingual capabilities of multilingual encoder-based and encoder-decoder LLMs. However, some decoder-based LLMs opt to ignore parallel data instead. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the impact of adding parallel data on LLMs' multilingual capabilities, focusing specifically on translation and multilingual common-sense reasoning. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that parallel data can significantly improve LLMs' multilingual capabilities.