Being able to thoroughly assess massive multi-task language understanding (MMLU) capabilities is essential for advancing the applicability of multilingual language models. However, preparing such benchmarks in high quality native language is often costly and therefore limits the representativeness of evaluation datasets. While recent efforts focused on building more inclusive MMLU benchmarks, these are conventionally built using machine translation from high-resource languages, which may introduce errors and fail to account for the linguistic and cultural intricacies of the target languages. In this paper, we address the lack of native language MMLU benchmark especially in the under-represented Turkic language family with distinct morphosyntactic and cultural characteristics. We propose two benchmarks for Turkic language MMLU: TUMLU is a comprehensive, multilingual, and natively developed language understanding benchmark specifically designed for Turkic languages. It consists of middle- and high-school level questions spanning 11 academic subjects in Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We also present TUMLU-mini, a more concise, balanced, and manually verified subset of the dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate a diverse range of open and proprietary multilingual large language models (LLMs), including Claude, Gemini, GPT, and LLaMA, offering an in-depth analysis of their performance across different languages, subjects, and alphabets. To promote further research and development in multilingual language understanding, we release TUMLU-mini and all corresponding evaluation scripts.

Text classification field of natural language processing has been experiencing remarkable growth in recent years. Especially, sentiment analysis has received a considerable attention from both industry and research community. However, only a few research examples exist for Azerbaijani language. The main objective of this research is to apply various machine learning algorithms for determining the sentiment of news articles in Azerbaijani language. Approximately, 30.000 social news articles have been collected from online news sites and labeled manually as negative or positive according to their sentiment categories. Initially, text preprocessing was implemented to data in order to eliminate the noise. Secondly, to convert text to a more machine-readable form, BOW (bag of words) model has been applied. More specifically, two methodologies of BOW model, which are tf-idf and frequency based model have been used as vectorization methods. Additionally, SVM, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes algorithms have been applied as the classification algorithms, and their combinations with two vectorization approaches have been tested and analyzed. Experimental results indicate that SVM outperforms other classification algorithms.