[Submitted on 9 Sep 2026]
Title:Multilingual in Name Only? Cultural and Linguistic Weaknesses of LLMs in Urdu
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Abstract:Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for open-ended text generation, yet their behaviour in low-resource languages remains poorly understood. In this work, we question how correct and reliable is the generation of multilingual LLMs when used for the task of story generation. We consider Urdu language as a representative low-resource language. We generate Urdu-Stories, a corpus of 93 stories generated using three contemporary LLMs (GPT-5.1, Qwen-3-Max, DeepSeek-3.1). We manually annotate the errors present in them under a nine-label linguistic, semantic, and cultural taxonomy. Our notable findings suggest that LLMs often make basic errors of grammar and semantics. The stories lack coherence, have unnatural repetition and show pervasive cultural shallowness. We further show using few-shot prompting that the cultural and context errors largely remain unresolved. Our findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs as a reliable source of content generation and information retrieval for low-resource languages.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.10758 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.10758v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10758
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Farah Adeeba [view email] [v1] Wed, 9 Sep 2026 18:59:52 UTC (465 KB)
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