---
title: "## Paper"
source: EleutherAI LM Evaluation Harness
source_url: https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness
licence: MIT
domain: agentic-ai
subdomain: eleutherai-lm-eval
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

#

## Paper
Title: `The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants`

Paper Link: https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.862/

## Abstract
>Belebele is a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. This dataset enables the evaluation of mono- and multi-lingual models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question has four multiple-choice answers and is linked to a short passage from the FLORES-200 dataset. The human annotation procedure was carefully curated to create questions that discriminate between different levels of generalizable language comprehension and is reinforced by extensive quality checks. While all questions directly relate to the passage, the English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual abilities of language models and NLP systems.

HomePage: https://github.com/facebookresearch/belebele

### Changelog

- **v3**: Renamed group from `belebele` to `afrobench_belebele` to resolve duplicate group name conflict with `belebele/_belebele.yaml`.

### Citation

```
@inproceedings{bandarkar-etal-2024-belebele,
    title = "The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants",
    author = "Bandarkar, Lucas  and
      Liang, Davis  and
      Muller, Benjamin  and
      Artetxe, Mikel  and
      Shukla, Satya Narayan  and
      Husa, Donald  and
      Goyal, Naman  and
      Krishnan, Abhinandan  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Khabsa, Madian",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.44/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.44",
    pages = "749--775",
    abstract = "We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the FLORES-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and findings, notably that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems."
}
```
