AmharicStoryQA: A Multicultural Story Question Answering Benchmark in Amharic

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02774v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:28:19 GMT
• Title: AmharicStoryQA: A Multicultural Story Question Answering Benchmark in Amharic
• Authors: Israel Abebe Azime, Abenezer Kebede Angamo, Hana Mekonen Tamiru, Dagnachew Mekonnen Marilign, Philipp Slusallek, Seid Muhie Yimam, Dietrich Klakow,
• Abstract summary: We argue that evaluations overlook meaningful cultural variation that exists within a single language.<n>We introduce textbftextitAmharicStoryQA, a benchmark grounded in culturally diverse narratives from Amharic-speaking regions.
• Score: 25.361090310093072
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: With the growing emphasis on multilingual and cultural evaluation benchmarks for large language models, language and culture are often treated as synonymous, and performance is commonly used as a proxy for a models understanding of a given language. In this work, we argue that such evaluations overlook meaningful cultural variation that exists within a single language. We address this gap by focusing on narratives from different regions of Ethiopia and demonstrate that, despite shared linguistic characteristics, region-specific and domain-specific content substantially influences language evaluation outcomes. To this end, we introduce \textbf{\textit{AmharicStoryQA}}, a long-sequence story question answering benchmark grounded in culturally diverse narratives from Amharic-speaking regions. Using this benchmark, we reveal a significant narrative understanding gap in existing LLMs, highlight pronounced regional differences in evaluation results, and show that supervised fine-tuning yields uneven improvements across regions and evaluation settings. Our findings emphasize the need for culturally grounded benchmarks that go beyond language-level evaluation to more accurately assess and improve narrative understanding in low-resource languages.

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