TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish

Arda Yüksel, Abdullatif Köksal, Lütfi Kerem Senel, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schuetze


Abstract
Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs’ understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.413
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7035–7055
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.413/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.413
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arda Yüksel, Abdullatif Köksal, Lütfi Kerem Senel, Anna Korhonen, and Hinrich Schuetze. 2024. TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 7035–7055, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish (Yüksel et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.413.pdf
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.413.data.zip