Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages
Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Fuxuan Wei, Shijue Huang, Wanxiang Che · 2023
Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention.Specifically, zeroshot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt "Let's think step by step!".Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development.In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages.Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) taskspecific solver prompting.The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task.In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages.Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance.We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.Answer: 48.After understanding, you should act as an expert in arithmetic reasoning in German… Verstanden! Hier ist die Lösung für die gegebene Aufgabe: 1. Da Jiesha 20 Jahre alt ist, ist Qioung 20-5... 2. Da Mary zwei Jahre jünger als Qioung ist... Antwort: 48.Sorry, I am an AI language model and I can only communicate in English.May I assist you with anything else?Let's understand the task in German step-by-step!German Prompting Please act as an expert in multi-lingual understanding in Chinese.Request:玛丽比琼小两岁，琼比杰莎大五岁。如果杰莎 20 岁，这 三个女孩的年龄总和是多少？ Let's understand the task in English step-by-step!After understanding, you should act as an expert in arithmetic reasoning in English.Let's resolve the task you understand above step-by-step!Finally, you should format your answer as 'Answer: [num]'.Sure! Let's solve the task step-by-step: 1.According to the first sentence, Mary is two years younger than Joan.Let's suppose Joan's age is J, then Mary's age is J -2. 2. According to the second sentence, Joan is five years older than Jessie.If Jessie's age is x, then Joan's age is x + 5... Answer: 68.