C4: A Multilingual Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Its Compendium

Pius von Däniken, Mark Cieliebak, Jan Deriu


Abstract
We introduce a new multilingual case study for evaluating retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems, based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium. The Catechism is a structured document with numbered paragraphs, officially translated into many languages under strict editorial alignment. The Compendium reformulates this material into a question-answer format with explicit citations to the corresponding paragraphs. Together, they form a set of parallel monolingual corpora that share identical semantic structure, enabling direct, controlled comparison of RAG performance across languages. Beyond its theological origin, this text pair closely mirrors real-world applications of RAG in institutional contexts, such as querying internal policy documents with associated FAQ-style summaries, making it a practical testbed for multilingual retrieval and grounded answer generation. We release our data collection scripts and baseline results for further research.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.590
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:
7446–7456
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-590
DOI:
10.63317/5a8nuzcc3cq3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pius von Däniken, Mark Cieliebak, and Jan Deriu. 2026. C4: A Multilingual Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Its Compendium. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7446–7456, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
C4: A Multilingual Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Its Compendium (von Däniken et al., LREC 2026)
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