ALBA: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Evaluating Language and Linguistic Dimensions in Generative LLMs

Inês Vieira, Inês Calvo, Iago Paulo, James Furtado, Rafael Ferreira, Diogo Tavares, Diogo Glória-Silva, David Semedo, João Magalhães


Abstract
As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand across multilingual domains, evaluating their performance in under-represented languages becomes increasingly important. European Portuguese (pt-PT) is particularly affected, as existing training data and benchmarks are mainly in Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR). To address this, we introduce ALBA, a linguistically grounded benchmark designed from the ground up to assess LLM proficiency in linguistic-related tasks in pt-PT across eight linguistic dimensions, including Language Variety, Culture-bound Semantics, Discourse Analysis, Word Plays, Syntax, Morphology, Lexicology, and Phonetics and Phonology. ALBA is manually constructed by language experts and paired with an LLM-as-a-judge framework for scalable evaluation of pt-PT generated language. Experiments on a diverse set of models reveal performance variability across linguistic dimensions, highlighting the need for comprehensive, variety-sensitive benchmarks that support further development of tools in pt-PT.
Anthology ID:
2026.propor-1.69
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1
Month:
April
Year:
2026
Address:
Salvador, Brazil
Editors:
Marlo Souza, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Diana Santos, Larissa Freitas, Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza, Eugénio Ribeiro
Venue:
PROPOR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
697–707
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.69/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Inês Vieira, Inês Calvo, Iago Paulo, James Furtado, Rafael Ferreira, Diogo Tavares, Diogo Glória-Silva, David Semedo, and João Magalhães. 2026. ALBA: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Evaluating Language and Linguistic Dimensions in Generative LLMs. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1, pages 697–707, Salvador, Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ALBA: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Evaluating Language and Linguistic Dimensions in Generative LLMs (Vieira et al., PROPOR 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.69.pdf