Interpretable Cross-Lingual Alignment in Small Language Models: Probing Cultural and Pragmatic Reasoning in Japanese-English Bilingual LLMs

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models work well on English and behave in poorly understood ways on languages typologically far from it. Japanese is a clean example, where evaluation still leans on translation quality and JGLUE-style benchmarks, which roll lexical, syntactic and pragmatic competence into a single score. The phenomena on which general-purpose models fail Japanese users are pragmatic: honorifics, in-group and out-group reference, context-sensitive