Khayyam Challenge (PersianMMLU): Is Your LLM Truly Wise to The Persian Language?

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging due to their generative nature, necessitating precise evaluation methodologies. Additionally, non-English LLM evaluation lags behind English, resulting in the absence or weakness of LLMs for many languages. In response to this necessity, we introduce Khayyam Challenge (also known as PersianMMLU), a meticulously curated collection comprising 20,192 four-choice questions sourced from 38 diverse tasks extracted from Persian examinations, spanning a wide spectrum of subjects, complexities, and ages. The primary objective of the Khayyam Challenge is to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of LLMs that support the Persian language. Distinctive features of the Khayyam Challenge are (i) its comprehensive coverage of various topics, including literary comprehension, mathematics, sciences, logic, intelligence testing, etc., aimed at assessing different facets of LLMs such as language comprehension, reasoning, and information retrieval across various educational stages, from lower primary school to upper secondary school (ii) its inclusion of rich metadata such as human response rates, difficulty levels, and descriptive answers (iii) its utilization of new data to avoid data contamination issues prevalent in existing frameworks (iv) its use of original, non-translated data tailored for Persian speakers, ensuring the framework is free from translation challenges and errors while encompassing cultural nuances (v) its inherent scalability for future data updates and evaluations without requiring special human effort. Previous works lacked an evaluation framework that combined all of these features into a single comprehensive benchmark. Furthermore, we evaluate a wide range of existing LLMs that support the Persian language, with statistical analyses and interpretations of their outputs.

Paper

Similar papers

Reviewer oJHg7/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-10

Summary

This paper describes a new QA dataset for the Persian language. Just like the MMLU dataset for English, this new 'PersianMMLU' dataset covers a wide range of subjects, ranging from the natural sciences to the humanities, and contains more than 20,000 questions. The questions are multiple-choice with 4 answer alternatives, of which one is correct. Each question has its associated metadata, which includes the educational stage for which the question is intended, the difficulty level (which I assume is relative to the intended user group), and a detailed explanation of why the indicated correct answer is correct. The latter is very useful, as it can be used for 'chain-of-thought' training. As a motivation for their work, the authors convincingly point out several shortcomings of using an automatically translated variant of English datasets like the MMLU. The paper also contains experiments of applying various models to answer the questions. An extensive appendix gives lots of details of various aspects of the dataset. Unless I missed it, it is not explicitly stated in the paper that the dataset will be made public upon acceptance of the paper. It is merely said that 'all associated code is publicly accessible in [anonymous link]'. I assume the dataset will also be published open to everyone, but the authors should state this explicitly.

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

The dataset seems to be a major contribution to Persian NLP. The paper is well written. Everything related to the dataset is clear, but I have some questions about the experiment section.

Reasons to reject

Unless the authors commit to publishing the dataset free to the world upon acceptance of the paper, the paper should be rejected. I believe the area chair should sort this out with the authors before deciding on publication. I didn't understand the experimentation section very well. See questions below.

Questions to authors

Remove this sales talk, as it is completely unscientific: "Since conducting its first examination in 1993, Kanoon has been at the forefront of educational innovation, serving a nationwide network of 450,000 students. The center is highly regarded for its comprehensive range of educational services, notably its facilitation of creating and administering smart, customized tests and providing standardized solutions for exercises through the Learning Ladder platform. This initiative aims to enable educators to design and administer quality, customized tests effortlessly and to provide students with insightful feedback to enhance their learning process." "The quality of the questions in the dataset is exceptionally high, a testament to the institution’s reputable standing in the educational sector" How do you measure the quality of the questions? This just seems like more sales talk. Remove. "The ongoing development of new questions for various educational stages and subjects allows for the continuous expansion and updating of the dataset, reducing the risks of data contamination and erosion." Are you committing to a regular update of the dataset, or what does this mean, really? How was the human success rate in Figure 2 computed? Explain the regex method better. Give examples of answers where it is successful. The "single probability probability" and "full answer probability" were also a bit obscure to me. Shouldn't the model just output a single letter ("a", "b", "c", or "d") indicating the correct answer? "In cases where Regex failed to identify the correct option, we utilized a pre-trained model to generate embeddings for each choice..." Is this still part of the Regex method, or is this an alternative method? I didn't understand this sentence, please explain: "We chose the answer selected by humans if the combined total of the remaining three options was lower."

Reviewer yLgN7/10 · confidence 5/52024-05-10

Summary

The paper introduces PersianMMLU which consists of a large number of multiple choice questions spanning a wide number of diverse tasks and subjects. The dataset notably does *not* use machine translation (as it is sourced from Persian examinations). The authors surface 3 main contributions: (i) comprehensive coverage of topics (ii) richness of associated metadata (iii) usage of new data to prevent contamination (though to be fair what was new at the time of experimentation is now no longer new in today's vastly connected & scrapable world) (iv) native Persian artifacts (v) inherent scalability. Overall, the paper is well-written, sets clear differentiation from existing Persian/Farsi datasets like ParSQuAD and ParsiNLU, and presents some metrics on existing LLMs on their new dataset.

Rating

7

Confidence

5

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

I appreciate the various experiments that the authors performed including benchmarking various settings like different answer extraction methods, the impact of translation quality, and how few-shot examples did not help on the given MCQA task. The results showing that regex answer extraction outperformed the other methods was not surprising.

Reasons to reject

I have no reason to reject this paper but I do have a lot of questions.

Questions to authors

Section 3.2 talks about the ways the dataset was augmented -- were these all done with human experts or were some extracted from original metadata from learning ladder? For example "Difficulty Level" specifies that each question was classified into one of five distinct difficulty levels but authors don't mention how or by whom. The dataset seems to be heavily based on data from the Learning Ladder website. Were there additional processing steps that the authors have implemented? Overall, the dataset construction section (3.1) feels a tad sparse. I did find that mT0XL outperforming a persian-english LLM to be interesting, especially given it's fairly strong performance on other MCQA datasets like Belebele (wondering if the authors dug deeper into this)? Were the authors able to do any finetuning experiments? E.g. finetuning on MCQA (maybe even Persian MCQA) datasets and then running the model on this particular task?

Reviewer tpuE6/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-11

Summary

This work introduces a benchmark akin to MMLU for evaluating and tracking the progress of LLMs for the Persian language. The benchmark is built by gathering the questions from the website of a private educational institution in Iran, which most notably designs and holds regular mock examination sessions for students at different education levels. The benchmark covers 38 subjects and comes with metadata (details in reasons to accept) that facilitates further analysis of the patterns in capabilities of LLMs.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

I agree with the authors' argument on the importance of creating language-specific benchmarks rather than translating an English benchmark. So I consider this a huge strength. Additionally, I really like the metadata that's naturally included. The private educational institute that the questions are gathered from provides solution booklets after each session of the regularly held mock exams. The solution booklet includes metadata such as the grade for which the question was designed, its difficulty, descriptive solution, whether or not the question included a trap choice among the choices, students' correct answer rate (correlated with human performance), and the year that the question was designed. I think this metadata is very valuable and can lead to a discussion community on the benefits of including such metadata in creating benchmarks.

Reasons to reject

Given that this data was collected from a private educational institute, I believe more details should be provided on permission to collect and licensing details. Additionally, I'm not fully sure I understand the answer extraction methods in 4.2. More clear details would be beneficial (also refer to the questions below).

Questions to authors

Following the previous part of the review, I also have the questions below: - What does "We chose the answer selected by humans if the combined total of the remaining three options was lower." in 4.2 mean? Does this mean that in the regex method in some cases it was just assumed that the model would go with the same answer as the human? - Why do the prompts provided in the appendix don't use the same terminology for the grade levels as the main text? For instance, using second "grade of high school" instead of "upper secondary school". Or is that an effect of using machine translation systems? - I'm not able to see the results corresponding to "4.3 Impact of translation quality" anywhere. Assessing the claims in that section without seeing qualitative results is not viable.

Reviewer WmnJ6/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-13

Summary

This paper introduces the Khayyam Challenge (PersianMMLU), a benchmark to evaluate LLMs for the Persian language. It comprises 20k+ multiple choice questions from 38 tasks / subjects, meta information such as difficulty levels and descriptive answers are also included. Several state-of-the-art models including both open-source and commercial models are tested against this newly introduced dataset. Detailed analysis is also conducted to provide new insights.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

- Evaluating language models in languages other than English is an important task, and this paper introduces a new benchmark dataset for a relatively less-studied language namely Persian, which would be valuable for future research. - The newly introduced dataset contains rich metadata, enriching the contribution. - Multiple multilingual models are employed in the experiments and analysis among different aspects such as trap analysis, selected choice distribution are considered.

Reasons to reject

- Regarding the data collection process: Since the questions are sourced from a specific website, several potential issues arise, including bias in the questions, contamination of data from a single source, and potential licensing issues. The authors should address these concerns in their clarification. - The current discussion on data contamination is not convincing; the mere incorporation of previously unused questions does not guarantee the absence of contamination in the dataset. I would suggest employing data contamination detection methods for a more robust analysis. - While the authors mention the challenge of translating English questions into Persian as a motivation in the introduction, it might be better to explore this issue in the experiments as well. For example, assessing whether translated MMLU can effectively serve as a proxy for testing the model's proficiency in Persian, and identify any associated issues or weaknesses with such translated data. - A minor point: including a complete example would enhance clarity and provide a more vivid understanding.

Reviewer oJHg2024-06-05

Thanks for the explanations. Great that the dataset will be accessible!

Reviewer WmnJ2024-06-05

Thanks for your response. Regarding the first point about the "bias" of the dataset: While standard examinations can alleviate some bias, sourcing data from a single source can still introduce significant bias, such as in the style and difficulty of the questions. This is something I would like the authors to discuss in the paper. On the data contamination issue, it's good to see that the authors conducted some numerical checks. However, the hypothesis that "the website features an authentication-required login interface that prevents access through common web crawling methods, thereby helping to prevent data contamination" is not very convincing. I assume there are also many copies outside this specific site if such an exam is a very important one. Therefore, one possible solution would be to check the n-gram overlap of the questions with common crawl dumps, which might be more convincing. Overall, the authors have addressed some of my concerns, and I would like to increase my score to 6.

Reviewer tpuE2024-06-07

Response to the Rebuttal

I acknowledge reading the authors' response and thank them for addressing my questions. l believe my original scorer still correctly reflects my overall evaluation of the paper, and therefore, I'm keeping my score the same. I still believe that the "answer extraction methods" need to be described more clearly and recommend that as a major area of focus and perhaps rewriting for the camera-ready version to the authors.

Program Chairsdecision2024-07-10

Decision

Accept

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