Python is Not Always the Best Choice: Embracing Multilingual Program of Thoughts
Xianzhen Luo, Qingfu Zhu, Zhiming Zhang, Libo Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che
Abstract
Program of Thoughts (PoT) is an approach characterized by its executable intermediate steps, which ensure the accuracy of the logical calculations in the reasoning process. Currently, PoT primarily uses Python. However, relying solely on a single language may result in suboptimal solutions and overlook the potential benefits of other programming languages. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the programming languages used in PoT and find that no single language consistently delivers optimal performance across all tasks and models. The effectiveness of each language varies depending on the specific scenarios. Inspired by this, we propose a task and model agnostic approach called MultiPoT, which harnesses strength and diversity from various languages. Experimental results reveal that it significantly outperforms Python Self-Consistency. Furthermore, it achieves comparable or superior performance compared to the best monolingual PoT in almost all tasks across all models. In particular, MultiPoT achieves more than 4.6% improvement on average on ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo-0701).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{luo-etal-2024-python,
title = "Python is Not Always the Best Choice: Embracing Multilingual Program of Thoughts",
author = "Luo, Xianzhen and
Zhu, Qingfu and
Zhang, Zhiming and
Qin, Libo and
Zhang, Xuanyu and
Yang, Qing and
Xu, Dongliang and
Che, Wanxiang",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.408/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.408",
pages = "7185--7212"
}