Project description
A new push for global language equity
The revolutionary power of large language models (LLMs) has benefited communities whose languages are well-represented in training data, primarily English. Yet, these few languages fail to serve large segments of the global population who collectively speak over 7 000 languages. For intelligent systems to be truly useful, they must function effectively in the preferred languages and local knowledge environments of their users. This expansion requires re-thinking cross-lingual transfer, especially since regional and cultural knowledge differs dramatically across languages. The ERC-funded RESPECT-LM project aims to solve this by developing new inference-time algorithms that dynamically localise, augment and adapt the knowledge within multilingual LLMs for any query, ensuring LLMs can be contextualised and grounded to the needs of all language communities.
Objective
The technical advances, and resulting societal opportunities, of Large Language Models (LLMs) have principally benefited communities whose primary languages are well-represented in the written data used for training LLMs (e.g. English). While these few high-resource languages are used by many around the world, they do not cover large segments of the global population of 8.2 billion, who collectively speak over 7000 languages. For intelligent natural language systems to be adopted and useful, they must enable interaction in the preferred languages of their users and be knowledgeable of the environments of those users. This expansion of LLM functionality requires re-thinking the cross-lingual transfer paradigm for enabling systems in low-resource languages. In an era where LLMs are knowledge bases, naive reasoners, and interactive agents, our intuitions that held for cross-lingual transfer to linguistic tasks will not extend to transferring regional and cultural knowledge understanding, which may differ even among similar languages.
In this proposal, we reformulate cross-lingual transfer using inference-time algorithms that dynamically localize, augment, and adapt implicit language and knowledge representations of multilingual LLMs for queries presented in any language. These new algorithms will leverage shared linguistic knowledge for cross-lingual transfer to new languages while disentangling regional and cultural knowledge that is tied to language but unique to individual language environments. Second, we will develop novel modular architectures to catalyze our adaptation algorithms by disentangling language and knowledge representations within multilingual LLMs during pretraining. Finally, we will develop new benchmarks, settings, and standards for reliable evaluation of regional knowledge in multilingual contexts.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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1015 Lausanne
Switzerland
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