Unveiling the Linguistic Acceptability Judgments of Large Language Models in Multilingual Contexts

Fuyu Xing, Haoyu Huang, Dawei Mo, Xinzhuo Yang, Zixuan Gao, Wei Wang, Zimu Wang, Haiyang Zhang


Abstract
"Linguistic acceptability judgments are essential for evaluating how language models internalize human-like grammatical knowledge. Though some studies have evaluated large language mod-els (LLMs) in this context, existing research lacks systematic exploration of diverse learning paradigms in a multilingual setting. In this paper, we present the first multilingual evaluation of LLMs across four languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) in the field of linguistic acceptability. Our evaluation spans both general-purpose (i.e., GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini,DeepSeek-V3, GLM-4-32B, and the Qwen series) and reasoning-oriented (QwQ-32B-Preview and DeepSeek-R1-32B) models under zero-shot and monolingual, cross-lingual and multilingual fine-tuning settings, with comparisons to pre-trained language model (PLM) baselines. Our analysis highlights the strong generalizability of large-scale LLMs through zero-shot prompting, the challenges of fine-tuning small-sized LLMs with skewed training data, the effectiveness of multilingual fine-tuning for low-resource languages, the scaling law exhibited on the task, and the limitation of reasoning-oriented models on the task, even when “aha moments” occur during the reasoning process."
Anthology ID:
2025.ccl-1.65
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL 2025)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Jinan, China
Editors:
Maosong Sun, Peiyong Duan, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruifeng Xu, Weiwei Sun
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
852–863
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ccl/2025.ccl-1.65/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fuyu Xing, Haoyu Huang, Dawei Mo, Xinzhuo Yang, Zixuan Gao, Wei Wang, Zimu Wang, and Haiyang Zhang. 2025. Unveiling the Linguistic Acceptability Judgments of Large Language Models in Multilingual Contexts. In Proceedings of the 24th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL 2025), pages 852–863, Jinan, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Unveiling the Linguistic Acceptability Judgments of Large Language Models in Multilingual Contexts (Xing et al., CCL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ccl/2025.ccl-1.65.pdf