A Culturally-Rich Romanian NLP Dataset from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Videos

Alexandru Ganea, Antonia-Adelina Popovici, Marius Dumitran


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate varying performance across languages and cultural contexts. This study introduces a novel, culturally-rich, multilingual dataset derived from video recordings of the Romanian game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (Vrei să fii Milionar?). We employed an innovative process combining optical character recognition (OCR), automated text extraction, and manual verification to collect question-answer pairs, enriching them with metadata including question domain (e.g., biology, history), cultural relevance (Romanian-specific vs. international), and difficulty. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs, including Romanian-adapted models, on this dataset revealed significant performance disparities: models consistently achieve higher accuracy (80-95%) on international questions compared to Romanian-specific cultural questions (50-75%). We further investigate these differences through experiments involving machine translation of Romanian questions into English and cross-lingual tests using a comparable dataset in French. Our findings underscore the impact of cultural context and data source on LLM performance and offer practical insights for building robust, culturally-aware multilingual NLP systems, especially in educational domains. The dataset is publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
378–387
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.46/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandru Ganea, Antonia-Adelina Popovici, and Marius Dumitran. 2025. A Culturally-Rich Romanian NLP Dataset from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Videos. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 378–387, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
A Culturally-Rich Romanian NLP Dataset from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Videos (Ganea et al., RANLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.46.pdf