MultiWikiQA: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark in 300+ Languages

Abstract: We introduce a new reading comprehension dataset, dubbed MultiWikiQA, which covers 306 languages. The context data comes from Wikipedia articles, with questions generated by an LLM and the answers appearing verbatim in the Wikipedia articles. We conduct a crowdsourced human evaluation of the fluency of the generated questions across 30 of the languages, providing evidence that the questions are of good quality. We evaluate 6 different LLMs, both decoder and encoder models of varying sizes, showing that the benchmark is sufficiently difficult and that there is a large performance discrepancy amongst the languages. The dataset and survey evaluations are freely available.