Measuring Taiwanese Mandarin Language Understanding

Po-Heng Chen, Sijia Cheng, Wei-Lin Chen, Yen-Ting Lin, Yun-Nung Chen

Research Area: Evaluation

Keywords: Large Language Models, Taiwanese Mandarin, Traditional Chinese, Benchmark

TL;DR: A comprehensive benchmark for evaluating advanced knowledge and reasoning capability in LLMs under the context of Taiwanese Mandarin.

Abstract:

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has drawn substantial attention in the field recently.
This work focuses on evaluating LLMs in a Chinese context, specifically, for Traditional Chinese which has been largely underrepresented in existing benchmarks.
We present TMLU, a comprehensive evaluation suit tailored for assessing the advanced knowledge and reasoning capability in LLMs, under the context of Taiwanese Mandarin.
TMLU consists of an array of 37 subjects across social science, STEM, humanities, Taiwan-specific content, and others, ranging from middle school to professional levels.
In addition, we curate chain-of-thought-like few-shot explanations for each subject to facilitate the evaluation of complex reasoning skills.
To establish a comprehensive baseline, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on 24 advanced LLMs.
The results suggest that Chinese open-weight models demonstrate inferior performance comparing to multilingual proprietary ones, and open-weight models tailored for Taiwanese Mandarin lag behind the Simplified-Chinese counterparts.
The findings indicate great headrooms for improvement, and emphasize the goal of TMLU to foster the development of localized Taiwanese-Mandarin LLMs.
We release the benchmark and evaluation scripts for the community to promote future research.

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Submission Number: 331