Advances in Multilingual Large Language Models
Abstract
Large language models have taken over the field of natural language processing. However, they are not equally accessible across all languages. Frontier models tend to focus on a couple of dozen commercially relevant languages. The talk will report on research showing how well knowledge is transferred across languages in these models, how words in different languages are represented, and how to make them more multilingual.
Short Bio
Philipp Koehn is a professor in computer science at Johns Hopkins University. He is a leading researcher in the field of machine translation, published two textbooks in the field and over 200 research papers as well as numerous datasets and open source tools. His research extends also to mulitlinguality in large language models, speech translation, and neuro-symbolic processing. Prof. Koehn received the Award of Honor from the International Association for Machine Translation in 2015 and was named ACL Fellow in 2024. He was the 2025 ACL General Chair.