KoBALT: Korean Benchmark For Advanced Linguistic Tasks

Hyopil Shin; Sangah Lee; Dongjun Jang; Wooseok Song; Jaeyoon Kim; Chaeyoung Oh; Hyemi Jo; Youngchae Ahn; Sihyun Oh; Hyohyeong Chang; Sunkyoung Kim; Jinsik Lee

arXiv · 2505.16125

KoBALT: Korean Benchmark For Advanced Linguistic Tasks

Hyopil Shin·Sangah Lee·Dongjun Jang·Wooseok Song·Jaeyoon Kim·Chaeyoung Oh·Hyemi Jo·Youngchae Ahn·Sihyun Oh·Hyohyeong Chang·Sunkyoung Kim·Jinsik Lee

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Abstract

We introduce KoBALT (Korean Benchmark for Advanced Linguistic Tasks), a comprehensive linguistically-motivated benchmark comprising 700 multiple-choice questions spanning 24 phenomena across five linguistic domains: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics/phonology, and morphology. KoBALT is designed to advance the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) in Korean, a morphologically rich language, by addressing the limitations of conventional benchmarks that often lack linguistic depth and typological grounding. It introduces a suite of expert-curated, linguistically motivated questions with minimal n-gram overlap with standard Korean corpora, substantially mitigating the risk of data contamination and allowing a more robust assessment of true language understanding. Our evaluation of 20 contemporary LLMs reveals significant performance disparities, with the highest-performing model achieving 61\% general accuracy but showing substantial variation across linguistic domains - from stronger performance in semantics (66\%) to considerable weaknesses in phonology (31\%) and morphology (36\%). Through human preference evaluation with 95 annotators, we demonstrate a strong correlation between KoBALT scores and human judgments, validating our benchmark's effectiveness as a discriminative measure of Korean language understanding. KoBALT addresses critical gaps in linguistic evaluation for typologically diverse languages and provides a robust framework for assessing genuine linguistic competence in Korean language models.

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Hyopil Shin, Sangah Lee, Dongjun Jang, Wooseok Song, Jaeyoon Kim, Chaeyoung Oh, Hyemi Jo, Youngchae Ahn, Sihyun Oh, Hyohyeong Chang, Sunkyoung Kim, Jinsik Lee. 2025-05-22. KoBALT: Korean Benchmark For Advanced Linguistic Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16125

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