BenCzechMark : A Czech-centric Multitask and Multimetric Benchmark for Large Language Models with Duel Scoring Mechanism

TL;DR

BenCzechMark is a comprehensive Czech language benchmark with diverse tasks and a novel duel scoring system, enabling evaluation and comparison of large language models in Czech language understanding.

Contribution

It introduces the first Czech-centric benchmark with diverse tasks, a duel scoring mechanism, and a new Czech language model trained on a large Czech corpus.

Findings

Benchmark includes 50 challenging tasks across 8 categories.

The duel scoring system is grounded in statistical significance theory.

A new Czech-specific 7B language model is developed and evaluated.

Abstract

We present BenCzechMark (BCM), the first comprehensive Czech language benchmark designed for large language models, offering diverse tasks, multiple task formats, and multiple evaluation metrics. Its duel scoring system is grounded in statistical significance theory and uses aggregation across tasks inspired by social preference theory. Our benchmark encompasses 50 challenging tasks, with corresponding test datasets, primarily in native Czech, with 14 newly collected ones. These tasks span 8 categories and cover diverse domains, including historical Czech news, essays from pupils or language learners, and spoken word. Furthermore, we collect and clean BUT-Large Czech Collection, the largest publicly available clean Czech language corpus, and use it for (i) contamination analysis and (ii) continuous pretraining of the first Czech-centric 7B language model with Czech-specific tokenization. We use our model as a baseline for comparison with publicly available multilingual models. Lastly, we release and maintain a leaderboard with existing 50 model submissions, where new model submissions can be made at https://huggingface.co/spaces/CZLC/BenCzechMark.