Paper Detail

RespondeoQA: a Benchmark for Bilingual Latin-English Question Answering

Marisa Hudspeth, Patrick J. Burns, Brendan O'Connor

arxiv Score 14.3

Published 2026-04-22 · First seen 2026-04-23

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Abstract

We introduce a benchmark dataset for question answering and translation in bilingual Latin and English settings, containing about 7,800 question-answer pairs. The questions are drawn from Latin pedagogical sources, including exams, quizbowl-style trivia, and textbooks ranging from the 1800s to the present. After automated extraction, cleaning, and manual review, the dataset covers a diverse range of question types: knowledge- and skill-based, multihop reasoning, constrained translation, and mixed language pairs. To our knowledge, this is the first QA benchmark centered on Latin. As a case study, we evaluate three large language models -- LLaMa 3, Qwen QwQ, and OpenAI's o3-mini -- finding that all perform worse on skill-oriented questions. Although the reasoning models perform better on scansion and literary-device tasks, they offer limited improvement overall. QwQ performs slightly better on questions asked in Latin, but LLaMa3 and o3-mini are more task dependent. This dataset provides a new resource for assessing model capabilities in a specialized linguistic and cultural domain, and the creation process can be easily adapted for other languages. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/slanglab/RespondeoQA

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BibTeX

@article{hudspeth2026respondeoqa,
  title = {RespondeoQA: a Benchmark for Bilingual Latin-English Question Answering},
  author = {Marisa Hudspeth and Patrick J. Burns and Brendan O'Connor},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We introduce a benchmark dataset for question answering and translation in bilingual Latin and English settings, containing about 7,800 question-answer pairs. The questions are drawn from Latin pedagogical sources, including exams, quizbowl-style trivia, and textbooks ranging from the 1800s to the present. After automated extraction, cleaning, and manual review, the dataset covers a diverse range of question types: knowledge- and skill-based, multihop reasoning, constrained translation, and mixe},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20738},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2604.20738},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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