Quantifying Language Disparities in Multilingual Large Language Models

Abstract

Results reported in large-scale multilingual evaluations are often fragmented and confounded by factors such as target languages, differences in experimental setups, and model choices. We propose a framework that disentangles these confounding variables and introduces three interpretable metrics-the performance realisation ratio, its coefficient of variation, and language potential-enabling a finer-grained and more insightful quantification of actual performance disparities across both (i) models and (ii) languages. Through a case study of 13 model variants on 11 multilingual datasets, we demonstrate that our framework provides a more reliable measurement of model performance and language disparities, particularly for low-resource languages, which have so far proven challenging to evaluate. Importantly, our results reveal that higher overall model performance does not necessarily imply greater fairness across languages.