# KazMMLU: Evaluating Language Models on Kazakh, Russian, and Regional Knowledge of Kazakhstan

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09212/) (2023)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [Global MMLU: Understanding and Addressing Cultural and Linguistic Biases in Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03304/) (2024)
- [ArabicMMLU: Assessing Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12840/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Only Pass Primary School Exams in Indonesia: A Comprehensive Test on IndoMMLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04928/) (2023)
- [KazNERD: Kazakh Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13419/) (2021)
- [TUMLU: A Unified and Native Language Understanding Benchmark for Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11020/) (2025)
- [KazQAD: Kazakh Open-Domain Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04487/) (2024)
- [KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19335/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Sherkala-Chat: Building a State-of-the-Art LLM for Kazakh in a Moderately Resourced Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01493/) (2025)
- [Lost in Speech: Trilingual Spoken Hallucination Detection Across Audio and Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24707/) (2026)
- [Toward LLMs Beyond English-Centric Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15613/) (2026)
- [UrduMMLU: A Massive Multitask Benchmark for Urdu Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07167/) (2026)
- [CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22494/) (2026)
- [Unchecked or Falsely Accused? Evaluating AI-Generated Text Detectors on Kazakh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15870/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite having a population of twenty million, Kazakhstan's culture and language remain underrepresented in the field of natural language processing. Although large language models (LLMs) continue to advance worldwide, progress in Kazakh language has been limited, as seen in the scarcity of dedicated models and benchmark evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce KazMMLU, the first MMLU-style dataset specifically designed for Kazakh language. KazMMLU comprises 23,000 questions that cover various educational levels, including STEM, humanities, and social sciences, sourced from authentic educational materials and manually validated by native speakers and educators. The dataset includes 10,969 Kazakh questions and 12,031 Russian questions, reflecting Kazakhstan's bilingual education system and rich local context. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art multilingual models (Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, GPT-4, and DeepSeek V3) demonstrates substantial room for improvement, as even the best-performing models struggle to achieve competitive performance in Kazakh and Russian. These findings underscore significant performance gaps compared to high-resource languages. We hope that our dataset will enable further research and development of Kazakh-centric LLMs. Data and code will be made available upon acceptance.