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------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear colleague,

We are happy to announce the next webinar in the Language Technology webinar series organized by the HiTZ Chair of AI&LT (https://hitz.eus). You can check the videos of previous webinars and the schedule for upcoming webinars here: http://www.hitz.eus/webinars

Next webinar:

*Speaker:* Sebastian Ruder (Meta) *Title:* Multilingual LLM Evaluation in Practical Settings *Date: * Thursday, February 6, 2025 - 15:00 CET *Summary:* Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in a variety of applications across the globe but do not provide equal utility across languages. In this talk, I will discuss multilingual evaluation of LLMs in two practical settings: conversational instruction-following and usage of quantized models. For the first part, I will focus on a specific aspect of multilingual conversational ability where errors result in a jarring user experience: generating text in the user’s desired language. I will describe a new benchmark and evaluation of a range of LLMs. We find that even the strongest models exhibit language confusion, i.e., they fail to consistently respond in the correct language. I will discuss what affects language confusion, how to mitigate it, and potential extensions. In the second part, I will discuss the first evaluation study of quantized multilingual LLMs across languages. We find that automatic metrics severely underestimate the negative impact of quantization and that human evaluation—which has been neglected by prior studies—is key to revealing harmful effects. Overall, I highlight limitations of multilingual LLMs and challenges of real-world multilingual evaluation.

*Bio:* Sebastian Ruder is a research scientist at Meta based in Berlin, Germany where he works on improving evaluation and benchmarking of large language models (LLMs). He previously led the Multilinguality team at Cohere with the objective to improve the multilingual capabilities of Cohere's LLMs. Before that he was a research scientist at Google DeepMind. He completed his PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Insight Research Centre for Data Analytics, while working as a research scientist at Dublin-based text analytics startup AYLIEN. Previously, he studied Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and at Trinity College, Dublin. * Upcoming webinars:* · Christian Herff (Thursday, March 6, 2025) · Emanuele Bugliarello (Thursday, April 3, 2025) · André F. T. Martins (Thursday, May 8, 2025)

If you are interested in participating, please complete this registration form: http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_izenematea

If you cannot attend this seminar, but you want to be informed of the following HiTZ webinars, please complete this registration form instead: http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_info

Best wishes,

HiTZ Zentroa

P.S: HiTZ will not grant any type of certificate for attendance at these webinars.