@inproceedings{cheng-etal-2025-hkcanto,
    title = "{HKC}anto-Eval: A Benchmark for Evaluating {C}antonese Language Understanding and Cultural Comprehension in {LLM}s",
    author = "Cheng, Tsz Chung  and
      Cheng, Chung Shing  and
      Lau, Chaak-ming  and
      Lam, Eugene  and
      Yat, Wong Chun  and
      Yu, Hoi On  and
      Chong, Cheuk Hei",
    editor = "Boleda, Gemma  and
      Roth, Michael",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.conll-1.1/",
    pages = "1--11",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-271-8",
    abstract = "The ability of language models to comprehend and interact in diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes is crucial. The Cantonese language used in Hong Kong presents unique challenges for natural language processing due to its rich cultural nuances and lack of dedicated evaluation datasets. The HKCanto-Eval benchmark addresses this gap by evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Cantonese language understanding tasks, extending to English and Written Chinese for cross-lingual evaluation. HKCanto-Eval integrates cultural and linguistic nuances intrinsic to Hong Kong, providing a robust framework for assessing language models in realistic scenarios. Additionally, the benchmark includes questions designed to tap into the underlying linguistic metaknowledge of the models. Our findings indicate that while proprietary models generally outperform open-weight models, significant limitations remain in handling Cantonese-specific linguistic and cultural knowledge, highlighting the need for more targeted training data and evaluation methods. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/hon9kon9ize/hkeval2025."
}