Open Source Conversational LLMs do not know most Spanish words
Javier Conde Miguel González Nina Melero Raquel Ferrando Gonzalo Martínez Elena Merino-Gómez José Alberto Hernández Pedro Reviriego
The growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) and in particular in
conversational models with which users can interact has led to the development
of a large number of open-source chat LLMs. These models are evaluated on a
wide range of benchmarks to assess their capabilities in answering questions or
solving problems on almost any possible topic or to test their ability to
reason or interpret texts. Instead, the evaluation of the knowledge that these
models have of the languages has received much less attention. For example, the
words that they can recognize and use in different languages. In this paper, we
evaluate the knowledge that open-source chat LLMs have of Spanish words by
testing a sample of words in a reference dictionary. The results show that
open-source chat LLMs produce incorrect meanings for an important fraction of
the words and are not able to use most of the words correctly to write
sentences with context. These results show how Spanish is left behind in the
open-source LLM race and highlight the need to push for linguistic fairness in
conversational LLMs ensuring that they provide similar performance across
languages.