Reliable multilingual evaluation is difficult, and culturally appropriate evaluation is even harder to achieve.A common practice to fill this gap is to machine-translate English evaluation sets. However, translation introduces language bias and carries over cultural and regional assumptions from the original questions – often testing knowledge irrelevant to the target audience. In this work, we highlight the extent and impact of these biases and present a multilingual evaluation framework that aims to mitigate them through improved translations and annotation practices.Through a large-scale study involving professional and community translators and annotators, we show that state-of-the-art models excel primarily by learning Western-centric concepts. Notably, we find that model rankings on the full MMLU change when evaluated on a subset of questions explicitly marked as culturally sensitive.We release Global MMLU, a multilingual extension of MMLU across 42 languages, featuring improved translation quality, expanded language coverage, and designated subsets labeled as culturally sensitive and culturally agnostic to enable a more comprehensive and equitable benchmark for evaluating language models across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.

Documents are fundamental to preserving and disseminating information, often incorporating complex layouts, tables, and charts that pose significant challenges for automatic document understanding (DU). While vision-language large models (VLLMs) have demonstrated improvements across various tasks, their effectiveness in processing long-context vision inputs remains unclear. This paper introduces WikiMixQA, a benchmark comprising 1,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) designed to evaluate cross-modal reasoning over tables and charts extracted from 4,000 Wikipedia pages spanning seven distinct topics. Unlike existing benchmarks, WikiMixQA emphasizes complex reasoning by requiring models to synthesize information from multiple modalities. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art vision-language models, revealing that while proprietary models achieve ~70% accuracy when provided with direct context, their performance deteriorates significantly when retrieval from long documents is required. Among these, GPT-4-o is the only model exceeding 50% accuracy in this setting, whereas open-source models perform considerably worse, with a maximum accuracy of 27%. These findings underscore the challenges of long-context, multi-modal reasoning and establish WikiMixQA as a crucial benchmark for advancing document understanding research.

Understanding narratives requires reasoning about the cause-and-effect relationships between events mentioned in the text. While existing foundation models yield impressive results in many NLP tasks requiring reasoning, it is unclear whether they understand the complexity of the underlying network of causal relationships of events in narratives. In this work, we present CRAB, a new Causal Reasoning Assessment Benchmark designed to evaluate causal understanding of events in real-world narratives. CRAB contains fine-grained, contextual causality annotations for ~2.7K pairs of real-world events that describe various newsworthy event timelines (e.g., the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk). Using CRAB, we measure the performance of several large language models, demonstrating that most systems achieve poor performance on the task. Motivated by classical causal principles, we also analyze the causal structures of groups of events in CRAB, and find that models perform worse on causal reasoning when events are derived from complex causal structures compared to simple linear causal chains. We make our dataset and code available to the research community.

This paper proposes a multilingual Automated Text Summarization (ATS) method targeting the Financial Narrative Summarization Task (FNS-2022). We developed two systems; the first uses a pre-trained abstractive summarization model that was fine-tuned on the downstream objective, the second approaches the problem as an extractive approach in which a similarity search is performed on the trained span representations. Both models aim to identify the beginning of the continuous narrative section of the document. The language models were fine-tuned on a financial document collection of three languages (English, Spanish, and Greek) and aim to identify the beginning of the summary narrative part of the document. The proposed systems achieve high performance in the given task, with the sequence-to-sequence variant ranked 1st on ROUGE-2 F1 score on the test set for each of the three languages.