ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts

Dongwon Noh, Donghyeok Koh, Junghun Yuk, Gyuwan Kim, Jae Yong Lee, KyungTae Lim, Cheoneum Park


Abstract
Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce ScholarBench, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. ScholarBench targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, ScholarBench evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.465
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
8750–8782
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.465/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Dongwon Noh, Donghyeok Koh, Junghun Yuk, Gyuwan Kim, Jae Yong Lee, KyungTae Lim, and Cheoneum Park. 2025. ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 8750–8782, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts (Noh et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.465.pdf
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