Multilingual language models often perform unevenly across different languages due to limited generalization capabilities for some languages. This issue is significant because of the growing interest in making universal language models that work well for all languages. Instruction tuning with multilingual instruction-response pairs has been used to improve model performance across various languages. However, this approach is challenged by high computational costs, a lack of quality tuning data for all languages, and the "curse of multilinguality" -- the performance drop per language after adding many languages. Recent studies have found that working with datasets with few languages and a smaller number of instances can be beneficial. Yet, there exists no systematic investigation into how choosing different languages affects multilingual instruction tuning. Our study proposes a method to select languages for instruction tuning in a linguistically informed way, aiming to boost model performance across languages and tasks. We use a simple algorithm to choose diverse languages and test their effectiveness on various benchmarks and open-ended questions. Our results show that this careful selection generally leads to better outcomes than choosing languages at random. We suggest a new and simple way of enhancing multilingual models by selecting diverse languages based on linguistic features that could help develop better multilingual systems and guide dataset creation efforts. All resources, including the code for language selection and multilingual instruction tuning, are made available in our official repository at https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/ling-informed-mit enabling reproducibility and further research in this area.

本研究解决了多语言模型在不同语言间表现不均的问题，特别是由于传统调优方法的高计算成本和数据质量不足。我们提出了一种基于语言特征选择语言的调优方法，实验结果表明这种选择方式比随机选择语言更能提升模型在多任务中的表现，对多语言系统的开发和数据集创建具有重要影响。

语言学启发的多语言指令调优：是否存在最佳的语言选择？