The State and Fate of Multilingual, Contextual Evaluation in the NLP World

Abstract

Multilingual evaluation benchmarks are the primary instrument for assessing whether large language models generalize beyond English, yet the adequacy of these benchmarks has received little systematic scrutiny. We present a data-driven audit of 51 recent multilingual benchmarks spanning 242 datasets and 219 languages, organized around three pillars: coverage, representativeness, and rigor. Our analysis reveals that coverage is wide but thin with 36% of evaluated languages appearing in only a single benchmark, entire regions (Oceania, the Americas, Central Asia) are near-zero, and a stark task equity gap leaves low-resource languages evaluated on only 1-3 task categories versus 14 for high-resource languages. Representativeness is structurally compromised: translation from English remains the dominant construction strategy where 56% of all dataset-language instances are translated introducing artifacts and English-centric framing, while culturally grounded content is concentrated in a handful of community-driven benchmarks with narrow language scope. The ecosystem thus forces a trade-off between breadth and validity. Rigor is undermined by benchmark contamination, including translated benchmark leakage and parallel corpus overlap that evade surface-form detection. We synthesize these findings into concrete recommendations for building evaluation frameworks that are natively constructed, culturally grounded, contamination-aware, and designed to serve the communities whose languages they claim to evaluate. The dashboard with all the metadata collected can be found at https://aka.ms/multilingual-evals.