Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2308.16884 v2 pith:AWZQ2MI4 submitted 2023-08-31 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords languagedatasetmodelslanguagesbelebelecomprehensionmultilingualcapabilities
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Fairness Pruning: Locating Demographic Bias in GLU-MLP Layers via Differential Activations

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Unsigned differential activations locate a few GLU-MLP neurons whose zeroing surgically destabilizes demographic bias while retaining ~99.5% of measured capabilities.

  2. A Vietnamese Dataset for Text Segmentation and Multiple Choices Reading Comprehension

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new Vietnamese dataset for text segmentation and multiple-choice reading comprehension, with benchmarks showing multilingual BERT models lead on both tasks.

  3. Lost in the Mix: Evaluating LLM Understanding of Code-Switched Text

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Code-switching hurts LLM comprehension when non-English tokens enter English text, but inserting English into other languages often improves accuracy; fine-tuning mitigates losses more reliably than prompting.

  4. Cross-Lingual Optimization for Language Transfer in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    CLO, a modified DPO loss that contrasts English and translated target-language responses in the same batch, improves target-language instruction following and preserves English better than standard SFT.

  5. AgentScope 1.0: A Developer-Centric Framework for Building Agentic Applications

    cs.AI 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    AgentScope 1.0 packages the components needed to build, evaluate, and deploy LLM agent applications into one developer framework.

Pith tools