Dictionary Insertion Prompting for Multilingual Reasoning on Multilingual Large Language Models
Hongyuan Lu, Z.L. L, Wai Pang Lam · 2026
There are two shortages in the current Large Language Models (LLMs) era.The first is short of multilingual models, where most LLMs are English-centric and performance is limited on multilingual reasoning.The second is the place of external knowledge to be used, where most retrieved knowledge is prepended to the user queries (maybe sub-optimal).This paper presents a novel and simple yet effective method called Dictionary Insertion Prompting (DIP).When providing a non-English prompt, DIP looks up a word dictionary and inserts words' English counterparts into the middle of the prompt for LLMs.It then enables better translation into English and better English model thinking steps which leads to obviously better results.We experiment with 10 to 200 languages from FLORES-200. 1 Since there are no adequate datasets, we use the NLLB translator to create synthetic multilingual benchmarks from the existing 4 English reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K and AQuA.The synthetic benchmarks are translated back into English for quality assurance with manual annotation.Interestingly, the place for injecting the dictionary plays an important factor in the performance gains, and we found that interleaving the dictionary with the original words gives a better performance compared to prepending/appending the dictionary, under the same dictionary constructed. Dictionary Insertion ThoughtSolve math problems.The question is made up of the Buginese language.First translate the following question from Buginese into English: Janeth's(Alena) ducks(manre) lay(unu') 16(16) eggs(untu') per(se) day(hari).Alena(She) manre(eats) tellu(three) untu'(for) sarapan(breakfast) tungke'(every) essoe(morning) na(and) mappa'(bakes) muffin(muffins) untu'(for) sahaba'(her friends) na(and) tungke'(every) essoe(with) sibawa(four).Alena(She) mabalu(sells) siseng'e(remainer) ri(at) pasa(market) petani'e(farmers') tungke'(every) essoe(at) ri($) $2(2) per(per) fresh(fresh) duck(duck) egg(egg).Pilangenna(how much) dollar'e(in dollars) iyae(does she make) ro(every) mappa'e(make) tungke'(every) essoe(at) ri(at) pasa(market) petani'e.? Think step by step, then gives a numerical number as the final answer.Note: Your output format is as follows: 1. Translated English sentences 2. The derivation process 3.The final numerical answer Dictionary Insertion Thought Solve math problems.The question is made up of the Buginese language.Question: Janeth's ducks lay 16 eggs per day.Alena manre tellu untu' sarapan tungke' essoe na mappa' muffin untu' sahaba'na tungke' essoe sibawa eppa.Alena mabalu siseng'e ri pasa petani'e tungke' essoe ri $2 per fresh duck egg.Pilangenna dollar'e iyae ro mappa'e tungke' essoe ri pasa petani'e.You must only answer the final Numeric answer.Standard Prompting 32 Output ###No extra intermediate result### The standard prompting method ask the model to answer with a single result.There could be some other baselines, such as: 1. Chain-of-Dictionary which append the dictionary to the prompt.2. Chain-of-thought reasoning that thinks in monolingual languages.We will later demonstrate in our experiments that DIT is obviously better than them.Some of them add additional thinking steps, and some of them modify the original prompt.###No extra intermediate results### Intermediate Results -Janeth's ducks lay **16 eggs per day**.-Alenaeats **3 eggs** for breakfast, which leaves **16 -3 = 13** eggs.-Shebakes muffins using **4 eggs** for her friends, leaving her with **13 -4 = 9** eggs.-Shesells the **9 remaining eggs** at the farmers' market.-Eachegg sells for **$2**, so she earns **9 eggs × $2/egg = $18**.Thought 18 Output Janeth's ducks lay 16 eggs per day.She eats three eggs for breakfast every morning and bakes muffins for her friends every morning with four.She sells the remainder at the farmers' market every morning for $2 per fresh duck egg.How much does she make in dollars every day at the farmers' market?