Polishing Every Facet of the GEM: Testing Linguistic Competence of LLMs and Humans in Korean

SungHo Kim, Nayeon Kim, Taehee Jeon, SangKeun Lee


Abstract
We introduce the  ̲Korean  ̲Grammar  ̲Evaluation Bench ̲Mark (KoGEM), designed to assess the linguistic competence of LLMs and humans in Korean. KoGEM consists of 1.5k multiple-choice QA pairs covering five main categories and 16 subcategories. The zero-shot evaluation of 27 LLMs of various sizes and types reveals that while LLMs perform remarkably well on straightforward tasks requiring primarily definitional knowledge, they struggle with tasks that demand the integration of real-world experiential knowledge, such as phonological rules and pronunciation. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis suggests that incorporating such experiential knowledge could enhance the linguistic competence of LLMs. With KoGEM, we not only highlight the limitations of current LLMs in linguistic competence but also uncover hidden facets of LLMs in linguistic competence, paving the way for enhancing comprehensive language understanding. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/SungHo3268/KoGEM.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.492
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9955–9984
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.492/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
SungHo Kim, Nayeon Kim, Taehee Jeon, and SangKeun Lee. 2025. Polishing Every Facet of the GEM: Testing Linguistic Competence of LLMs and Humans in Korean. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9955–9984, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Polishing Every Facet of the GEM: Testing Linguistic Competence of LLMs and Humans in Korean (Kim et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.492.pdf