Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and self-correction abilities in high-resource languages like English, but their performance remains limited in low-resource languages such as Korean. In this study, we investigate whether reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance Korean reasoning abilities to a degree comparable to English. Our findings reveal that RL alone yields limited improvements when applied to models lacking inherent Korean reasoning capabilities. To address this, we explore several fine-tuning strategies and show that aligning the model’s internal reasoning processes with Korean inputs—particularly by tuning Korean-specific neurons in early layers—is key to unlocking RL’s effectiveness. We introduce a self-correction code-switching dataset to facilitate this alignment and observe significant performance gains in both mathematical reasoning and self-correction tasks. Ultimately, we conclude that the crucial factor in multilingual reasoning enhancement is not injecting new linguistic knowledge, but effectively eliciting and aligning existing reasoning capabilities. Our study provides a new perspective on how internal translation and neuron-level tuning contribute to multilingual reasoning alignment in LLMs.

This paper describes Jeonbuk National University (JBNU)’s system for the 2019 shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP 2019) at the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Of the five frameworks, we address only the DELPH-IN MRS Bi-Lexical Dependencies (DP), Prague Semantic Dependencies (PSD), and Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA) frameworks. We propose a unified parsing model using biaffine attention (Dozat and Manning, 2017), consisting of 1) a BERT-BiLSTM encoder and 2) a biaffine attention decoder. First, the BERT-BiLSTM for sentence encoder uses BERT to compose a sentence’s wordpieces into word-level embeddings and subsequently applies BiLSTM to word-level representations. Second, the biaffine attention decoder determines the scores for an edge’s existence and its labels based on biaffine attention functions between roledependent representations. We also present multi-level biaffine attention models by combining all the role-dependent representations that appear at multiple intermediate layers.

Neural machine translation decoders are usually conditional language models to sequentially generate words for target sentences. This approach is limited to find the best word composition and requires help of explicit methods as beam search. To help learning correct compositional mechanisms in NMTs, we propose concept equalization using direct mapping distributed representations of source and target sentences. In a translation experiment from English to French, the concept equalization significantly improved translation quality by 3.00 BLEU points compared to a state-of-the-art NMT model.