A Diagnostic Benchmark for Sweden-Related Factual Knowledge

Jenny Kunz


Abstract
Many Swedish benchmarks are translations of US-centric benchmarks and are therefore not suitable for testing knowledge that is particularly relevant, or even specific, to Sweden. We therefore introduce a manually written question-answering benchmark specifically targeted at Sweden-related personalities and events, many of which receive very limited coverage in international media. Our annotators drew inspiration from a popular radio program featuring public figures from culture and media, as well as major sports events in Sweden. The dataset can be used to measure factual recall across models of varying sizes and degrees of Swedish coverage, and allows probing of cross-lingual factual consistency, as it contains English translations. Using the dataset, we find that smaller models with stronger Swedish coverage perform comparably to a multilingual model three times larger in recalling Sweden-related facts. We also observe that continued pre-training on Swedish generally improves factual knowledge but leads to partial forgetting of previously known information. These results demonstrate the dataset’s potential as a diagnostic tool for studying language adaptation and knowledge retention in multilingual models during language adaptation.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.416
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
5328–5334
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-416
DOI:
10.63317/5c6ftec8tnio
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jenny Kunz. 2026. A Diagnostic Benchmark for Sweden-Related Factual Knowledge. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5328–5334, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Diagnostic Benchmark for Sweden-Related Factual Knowledge (Kunz, LREC 2026)
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