@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-thoughts,
    title = "Do Thoughts Depth Affect Multilingual Reasoning?",
    author = "Yang, Linjian  and
      Wang, Xinyan  and
      Liu, Kunpeng",
    editor = "Huang, Kaiyu  and
      Mo, Fengran  and
      Chen, Pinzhen  and
      Jiang, Meng",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models ({M}e{LLM} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.mellm-1.14/",
    pages = "149--158",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-430-9",
    abstract = "Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is commonly used to improve reasoning performance in large language models. We investigate its impact in multilingual contexts by systematically constraining reasoning steps across languages with varying resource levels. This study evaluates two models on two benchmarks with seven languages, comparing constrained CoT depth against zero-shot and free-CoT baselines. We demonstrate that increasing the number of reasoning steps does not consistently improve accuracy across various languages. While high-resource and mid-resource languages remain stable, low-resource languages often experience a decline in performance as the number of reasoning steps increases. We attribute this decline to error accumulation and reasoning noise, which are amplified under deeper reasoning in low-resource languages. These findings indicate that CoT is not inherently beneficial, but its effectiveness is significantly influenced by the interaction between reasoning steps and language resource availability."
}