Cetvel: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding, Generation and Cultural Capacity of LLMs for Turkish

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Main Authors: Er, Yakup Abrek, Kesen, Ilker, Şahin, Gözde Gül, Erdem, Aykut
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Er, Yakup Abrek
Kesen, Ilker
Şahin, Gözde Gül
Erdem, Aykut
author_facet Er, Yakup Abrek
Kesen, Ilker
Şahin, Gözde Gül
Erdem, Aykut
contents We introduce Cetvel, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in Turkish. Existing Turkish benchmarks often lack either task diversity or culturally relevant content, or both. Cetvel addresses these gaps by combining a broad range of both discriminative and generative tasks ensuring content that reflects the linguistic and cultural richness of Turkish language. Cetvel covers 23 tasks grouped into seven categories, including tasks such as grammatical error correction, machine translation, and question answering rooted in Turkish history and idiomatic language. We evaluate 33 open-weight LLMs (up to 70B parameters) covering different model families and instruction paradigms. Our experiments reveal that Turkish-centric instruction-tuned models generally underperform relative to multilingual or general-purpose models (e.g. Llama 3 and Mistral), despite being tailored for the language. Moreover, we show that tasks such as grammatical error correction and extractive question answering are particularly discriminative in differentiating model capabilities. Cetvel offers a comprehensive and culturally grounded evaluation suite for advancing the development and assessment of LLMs in Turkish.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16431
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cetvel: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding, Generation and Cultural Capacity of LLMs for Turkish
Er, Yakup Abrek
Kesen, Ilker
Şahin, Gözde Gül
Erdem, Aykut
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
We introduce Cetvel, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in Turkish. Existing Turkish benchmarks often lack either task diversity or culturally relevant content, or both. Cetvel addresses these gaps by combining a broad range of both discriminative and generative tasks ensuring content that reflects the linguistic and cultural richness of Turkish language. Cetvel covers 23 tasks grouped into seven categories, including tasks such as grammatical error correction, machine translation, and question answering rooted in Turkish history and idiomatic language. We evaluate 33 open-weight LLMs (up to 70B parameters) covering different model families and instruction paradigms. Our experiments reveal that Turkish-centric instruction-tuned models generally underperform relative to multilingual or general-purpose models (e.g. Llama 3 and Mistral), despite being tailored for the language. Moreover, we show that tasks such as grammatical error correction and extractive question answering are particularly discriminative in differentiating model capabilities. Cetvel offers a comprehensive and culturally grounded evaluation suite for advancing the development and assessment of LLMs in Turkish.
title Cetvel: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding, Generation and Cultural Capacity of LLMs for Turkish
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16431