Global MMLU: Understanding and Addressing Cultural and Linguistic Biases in Multilingual Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper investigates cultural and linguistic biases in multilingual datasets like MMLU, highlighting their impact on model evaluation and introducing Global MMLU, a more culturally aware benchmark across 42 languages.

Contribution

It identifies biases in existing multilingual benchmarks and presents Global MMLU, an improved, culturally sensitive evaluation dataset with broader language coverage and bias annotations.

Findings

28% of questions require culturally sensitive knowledge

84.9% of geographic questions focus on North America or Europe

Model rankings vary significantly when considering culturally biased subsets

Abstract

Cultural biases in multilingual datasets pose significant challenges for their effectiveness as global benchmarks. These biases stem not only from differences in language but also from the cultural knowledge required to interpret questions, reducing the practical utility of translated datasets like MMLU. Furthermore, translation often introduces artefacts that can distort the meaning or clarity of questions in the target language. A common practice in multilingual evaluation is to rely on machine-translated evaluation sets, but simply translating a dataset is insufficient to address these challenges. In this work, we trace the impact of both of these issues on multilingual evaluations and ensuing model performances. Our large-scale evaluation of state-of-the-art open and proprietary models illustrates that progress on MMLU depends heavily on learning Western-centric concepts, with 28% of all questions requiring culturally sensitive knowledge. Moreover, for questions requiring geographic knowledge, an astounding 84.9% focus on either North American or European regions. Rankings of model evaluations change depending on whether they are evaluated on the full portion or the subset of questions annotated as culturally sensitive, showing the distortion to model rankings when blindly relying on translated MMLU. We release Global MMLU, an improved MMLU with evaluation coverage across 42 languages -- with improved overall quality by engaging with compensated professional and community annotators to verify translation quality while also rigorously evaluating cultural biases present in the original dataset. This comprehensive Global MMLU set also includes designated subsets labeled as culturally sensitive and culturally agnostic to allow for more holistic, complete evaluation.