Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Linguistic-Integrated Reliability Audit

Abstract

Multilingual assessment systems commonly rely on translation for scoring and quality-control processes. We evaluate whether multilingual sentence embeddings can replace translated English input for Linguistic-Integrated Reliability Auditing (LiRA) across 11 PIRLS constructed-response items and three embedding models. Native-language embeddings reproduced translation-based reliability estimates closely while recovering responses excluded after translation failure, with no meaningful change in reliability.