Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language We Prompt Them in

Utkarsh Agarwal, Kumar Tanmay, Aditi Khandelwal, Monojit Choudhury

Abstract
Ethical reasoning is a crucial skill for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, moral values are not universal, but rather influenced by language and culture. This paper explores how three prominent LLMs – GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Llama2Chat-70B – perform ethical reasoning in different languages and if their moral judgement depend on the language in which they are prompted. We extend the study of ethical reasoning of LLMs by (CITATION) to a multilingual setup following their framework of probing LLMs with ethical dilemmas and policies from three branches of normative ethics: deontology, virtue, and consequentialism. We experiment with six languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. We find that GPT-4 is the most consistent and unbiased ethical reasoner across languages, while ChatGPT and Llama2Chat-70B show significant moral value bias when we move to languages other than English. Interestingly, the nature of this bias significantly vary across languages for all LLMs, including GPT-4.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.560
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6330–6340
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.560
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Utkarsh Agarwal, Kumar Tanmay, Aditi Khandelwal, and Monojit Choudhury. 2024. Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language We Prompt Them in. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6330–6340, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language We Prompt Them in (Agarwal et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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