The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2308.16884
Summary
Most multilingual NLU benchmarks together span only about 30 languages, which makes it hard to tell how well language models actually understand text beyond high-resource languages. The authors address this with BELEBELE, a multiple-choice reading comprehension benchmark covering 122 language variants. Passages come from the FLORES-200 translation benchmark. Annotators from a Language Service Provider first wrote English questions with four answer options, refined over several feedback rounds. Statistical checks then filtered out questions that shortcut-seeking models could solve, and the surviving items were translated so the dataset stays fully parallel. Because every language contains the same items, scores can be compared directly across languages.
The authors evaluate MLMs (fine-tuned on English data or with Translate-Train-All) and LLMs (in-context learning, or zero-shot for instruction-tuned models). Humans score almost perfectly, yet the English split alone challenges strong models. Smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data handle far more languages than English-centric LLMs, although the latter still transfer to over 30 languages. The resource enables fair evaluation of models in many low-resource languages for the first time.
Key points
- Scale: 900 questions over 488 distinct FLORES-200 passages, with four options per question and one correct answer.
- Coverage: 122 variants, representing 115 distinct languages from 27 families written in 29 scripts. These include romanized Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali and Sinhala, making it one of the first benchmarks for these variants.
- Quality control: The question set went through 5 annotation iterations with the LSP. Lexical-overlap features flagged heuristically solvable items, and roughly 20% of the final batch was discarded.
- Model findings: Large vocabularies and balanced pretraining data correlate with the best results on medium- and low-resource languages. English-centric LLMs need more parameters to generalize to distant languages.
- Script and limitations: Most models (except Falcon) score higher in native scripts than in Latin script. The authors warn about translationese effects, occasional FLORES errors, English-centric content, and possible contamination once the benchmark is public.
Cited by
- Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platform
- SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects
- Qwen3 Technical Report
Cite
@misc{bandarkar2023belebele,
title = {{The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants}},
author = {Bandarkar, Lucas and Liang, Davis and Muller, Benjamin and Artetxe, Mikel and Shukla, Satya Narayan and Husa, Donald and Goyal, Naman and Krishnan, Abhinandan and Zettlemoyer, Luke and Khabsa, Madian},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.44},
eprint = {2308.16884},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.44}
}References
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