multilingual

Definition

Handling many languages in one model. Sharing representations across languages produces genuine cross-lingual transfer, so low-resource languages benefit from data in high-resource ones; the counterpressure is interference, where finite capacity split across languages leaves each one worse than a dedicated monolingual model. Claimed language counts are weak evidence, since training data is extremely skewed — per-language results are the number that matters.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: SWE-Bench ProMax — Measuring What Coding Agents Can Really Do with Large-Scale, Multilingual RefactoringSWE-Bench ProMax: Benchmarking Agents on Large-Scale Multilingual Code Refactoring