TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models

Cagri Toraman, Ahmet Kaan Sever, Ayşe Aysu Cengiz, Elif Ecem Arslan, Görkem Sevinç, Sarp Kantar, Mete Mert Birdal, Yusuf Faruk Güldemir, Ali Buğra Kanburoğlu, Sezen Felekoğlu, Birsen Şahin Kütük, Büşra Tufan, Elif Genç, Serkan Coşkun, Gupse Ekin Demir, Muhammed Emin Arayıcı, Olgun Dursun, Onur Gungor, Susan Üsküdarlı, Abdullah Topraksoy, Esra Darıcı


Abstract
With the recent surge in the development of large language models, the need for comprehensive and language-specific evaluation benchmarks has become critical. While significant progress has been made in evaluating English-language models, benchmarks for other languages, particularly those with unique linguistic characteristics such as Turkish, remain less developed. Our study introduces TurkBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of generative large language models in the Turkish language. TurkBench involves 8,151 data samples across 21 distinct subtasks. These are organized under six main categories of evaluation: Knowledge, Language Understanding, Reasoning, Content Moderation, Turkish Grammar and Vocabulary, and Instruction Following. The diverse range of tasks and the culturally relevant data would provide researchers and developers with a valuable tool for evaluating their models and identifying areas for improvement. We further publish our benchmark for online submissions at https://huggingface.co/turkbench
Anthology ID:
2026.sigturk-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Kemal Oflazer, Abdullatif Köksal, Onur Varol
Venues:
SIGTURK | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
126–154
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigturk-1.12/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cagri Toraman, Ahmet Kaan Sever, Ayşe Aysu Cengiz, Elif Ecem Arslan, Görkem Sevinç, Sarp Kantar, Mete Mert Birdal, Yusuf Faruk Güldemir, Ali Buğra Kanburoğlu, Sezen Felekoğlu, Birsen Şahin Kütük, Büşra Tufan, Elif Genç, Serkan Coşkun, Gupse Ekin Demir, Muhammed Emin Arayıcı, Olgun Dursun, Onur Gungor, Susan Üsküdarlı, Abdullah Topraksoy, and Esra Darıcı. 2026. TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages (SIGTURK 2026), pages 126–154, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models (Toraman et al., SIGTURK 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigturk-1.12.pdf