Which Language Should a Skeleton Speak? Language Choices in Multilingual Reasoning
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.09607 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 Oct 2026]
Title:Which Language Should a Skeleton Speak? Language Choices in Multilingual Reasoning
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Abstract:Skeleton-based reasoning prompting is a promising training-free approach for structuring LLM reasoning, but prior work largely assumes an English-centric setting. We propose the Language-Aware Skeleton Exploration Framework (LASEF) to study skeleton-language choice in multilingual mathematical reasoning. Across math benchmarks, model scales, and languages, we show that English skeletons yield a small positive tendency on average, most visible for smaller models and low-resource languages. However, few language-level gains remain significant after correction, and English is not universally optimal. Combining greedy decoding, multi-rollout evaluation, translation ablation, and cross-benchmark validation, we further find three patterns of skeleton-language effects: directionally consistent, evaluation- and benchmark-dependent, and asymmetric negative. These effects cannot be fully explained by generation quality alone. Overall, skeleton language is a context-dependent design variable that requires multi-level exploration. All resources are released at this https URL.
| Comments: | Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Findings) |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.09607 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.09607v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09607
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Which Language Should a Skeleton Speak? Language Choices in Multilingual Reasoning, by HyeonSeok Lim and 5 other authors
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