In plain words: Asking the same real-world questions in many languages showed how answer quality and the culture behind each response change with the language used. Answers were consistently worse in low-resource languages, and the language chosen shifted the cultural context, dragging down quality.
Abstract
Users should not be systemically disadvantaged by the language they use for interacting with LLMs; i.e. users across languages should get responses of similar quality irrespective of language used. In this work, we create a set of real-world open-ended questions based on our analysis of the WildChat dataset and use it to evaluate whether responses vary by language, specifically, whether answer quality depends on the language used to query the model. We also investigate how language and culture are entangled in LLMs such that choice of language changes the cultural information and context used in the response by using LLM-as-a-Judge to identify the cultural context present in responses. To further investigate this, we evaluate LLMs on a translated subset of the CulturalBench benchmark across multiple languages. Our evaluations reveal that LLMs consistently provide lower quality answers to open-ended questions in low resource languages. We find that language significantly impacts the cultural context used by the model. This difference in context impacts the quality of the downstream answer.
Shourya Jain, Paras Chopra
arXiv:2601.15337 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Jan 20, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at LM4UC Workshop at AAAI'26, Submitted to ACL 2026. 17 pages, 7 figures