TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish

TL;DR

TurkishMMLU is a comprehensive Turkish language benchmark with over 10,000 questions across various subjects, designed to evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and cultural understanding of diverse large language models.

Contribution

It introduces the first high-school level Turkish QA benchmark, addressing limitations of translation-based evaluation and providing a detailed analysis of LLMs' Turkish language capabilities.

Findings

Multilingual and Turkish-specific models show varied performance.

Chain-of-thought reasoning improves accuracy.

Model performance varies across subjects and difficulty levels.

Abstract

Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs' understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU.