Paper Detail

From Values to Benchmarks: Evaluating Large Language Models for Governmental Use in Dutch

Laurens Samson, Iva Gornishka, Gossa Lô, Yuki M. Asano, Sennay Ghebreab

arxiv Score 12.2

Published 2026-08-10 · First seen 2026-08-11

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Abstract

Large language models are increasingly being deployed in governmental settings, yet few existing evaluation frameworks jointly reflect the values of public administration and the linguistic requirements of non-English contexts. We present the "Grip on LLMs" framework, a systematic evaluation suite for Dutch governmental use developed in collaboration with domain experts from a major Dutch municipal organisation. Through an advisory board process, user research, and a survey of the users of a civil-servant chatbot, we identify six evaluation dimensions (factuality, honesty, social bias, energy consumption, cost, and training data transparency) and operationalise them into a benchmark suite covering more than 30 multilingual and Dutch-specific models. Our results reveal that no single model excels across all dimensions, and that trade-offs are unavoidable: higher quality consistently comes at greater environmental impact and financial cost, while bias remains largely independent of both. We further find that factuality (whether a model answers correctly) and honesty (whether a model acknowledges what it does not know) are governed by distinct properties, with high factuality not implying high honesty. To make these findings actionable for non-technical audiences, we release a publicly accessible, user-friendly model overview designed for the full range of stakeholders involved in governmental LLM selection, from engineers to policymakers.

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BibTeX

@article{samson2026values,
  title = {From Values to Benchmarks: Evaluating Large Language Models for Governmental Use in Dutch},
  author = {Laurens Samson and Iva Gornishka and Gossa Lô and Yuki M. Asano and Sennay Ghebreab},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Large language models are increasingly being deployed in governmental settings, yet few existing evaluation frameworks jointly reflect the values of public administration and the linguistic requirements of non-English contexts. We present the "Grip on LLMs" framework, a systematic evaluation suite for Dutch governmental use developed in collaboration with domain experts from a major Dutch municipal organisation. Through an advisory board process, user research, and a survey of the users of a civ},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09925},
  keywords = {cs.CL, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2608.09925},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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