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Prompt Balance Matters: Understanding How Imbalanced Few-Shot Learning Affects Multilingual Sense Disambiguation in LLMs

Deshan Sumanathilaka Orcid Logo, Nicholas Micallef Orcid Logo, Julian Hough Orcid Logo

Proceedings of the Workshop on Beyond English: Natural Language Processing for all Languages in an Era of Large Language Models, Pages: 7 - 15

Swansea University Authors: Deshan Sumanathilaka Orcid Logo, Nicholas Micallef Orcid Logo, Julian Hough Orcid Logo

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Abstract

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Among the various prompting techniques, few-shot prompting has gained considerable attention for its practicality and effectiveness. This study investigates how few-shot pr...

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Published in: Proceedings of the Workshop on Beyond English: Natural Language Processing for all Languages in an Era of Large Language Models
ISBN: 978-954-452-105-9
Published: Shoumen, Bulgaria INCOMA Ltd. 2025
Online Access: https://acl-bg.org/proceedings/2025/GlobalNLP%202025/index.html
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa70198
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Among the various prompting techniques, few-shot prompting has gained considerable attention for its practicality and effectiveness. This study investigates how few-shot prompting strategies impact the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task, particularly focusing on the biases introduced by imbalanced sample distributions. We use the GLOSSGPT prompting method, an advanced approach for English WSD, to test its effectiveness across five languages: English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian. Our results show that imbalanced few-shot examples can cause incorrect sense predictions in multilingual languages, but this issue does not appear in English. To assess model behavior, we evaluate both the GPT-4o and LLaMA-3.1-70B models and the results highlight the sensitivity of multilingual WSD to sample distribution in few-shot settings, emphasizing the need for balanced and representative prompting strategies.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Funders: Hough’s work is supported by the EPSRC grant EP/X009343/1 ‘FLUIDITY’.
Start Page: 7
End Page: 15