TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models

Read full text
Authors: Çağrı Toraman, Sever, Ahmet Kaan, Ayşe CENGİZ, Elif Ecem Arslan, G. Sevinc, Mete Mert Birdal, Yusuf Faruk Güldemir, Ali Buğra Kanburoğlu, Sezen Felekoğlu, Osman Gürlek, Sarp Kantar, Birsen Şahin Kütük
+10 more Büşra Tufan, Elif Genç, Serkan Coşkun, Gupse Ekin Demir, Muhammed Emin Arayıcı, Olgun Dursun, Onur Güngör, Suzan Üsküdarlı, Abdullah Topraksoy, Esra Darıcı
Cited by: 0

Abstract

With the recent surge in the development of large language models, the need for comprehensive and language-specific evaluation benchmarks has become critical. While significant progress has been made in evaluating English-language models, benchmarks for other languages, particularly those with unique linguistic characteristics such as Turkish, remain less developed. Our study introduces TurkBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of generative large language models in the Turkish language. TurkBench involves 8,151 data samples across 21 distinct subtasks. These are organized under six main categories of evaluation: Knowledge, Language Understanding, Reasoning, Content Moderation, Turkish Grammar and Vocabulary, and Instruction Following. The diverse range of tasks and the culturally relevant data would provide researchers and developers with a valuable tool for evaluating their models and identifying areas for improvement. We further publish our benchmark for online submissions at https://huggingface.co/turkbench

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Natural Language Processing Techniques Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
11 January 2026
Document type
Preprint