Quiz rooms, trivia nights, and quiz shows challenge human knowledge across a wide range of topics, from canonical facts to everyday culture. In this paper, we examine whether large language models (LLMs) can perform competitively in such settings, using quiz-style questions to test them on both common and niche topics.
arXiv:2606. 07422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to answer culturally grounded questions across languages, yet it remains unclear whether local cultural knowledge is better accessed through English or the local language.
By Yang Zhang, Xiao Fei, Amr Mohamed, Sarah Almeida Carneiro, Mersin Konomi, Mingmeng Geng, Ahmed Asaad, Guokan Shang, Michalis Vazirgiannis
The paper compares Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation (Graph-RAG) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for answering culturally specific questions. Using the LatamQA dataset, Graph-RAG, built automatically from Wikipedia via KGGen, matches RAG performance and reduces the base LLM’s error by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a benchmark-aware variant. The approach also transfers zero‑shot to Portuguese, showing multilingual applicability.
By Pablo Poulenard, Yannis Karmim, Valentin Barri\`ere
The paper introduces the concept of Language Specific Knowledge (LSK), showing that multilingual language models can answer certain queries better when prompted in a language other than English, sometimes even in low‑resource languages. It defines a language‑selection problem and presents several baseline methods, including the authors’ LSKExtractor, to empirically demonstrate that choosing the optimal language can improve question‑answering performance across datasets covering cultural and social norms. Experiments reveal non‑intuitive mappings, such as Gemma models excelling on Chinese and Middle Eastern topics in Spanish and Qwen models performing best on authority and responsibility queries in Arabic and Chinese.
By Ishika Agarwal, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
arXiv:2608. 15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present L3Cube-IndicQuest v2, a large-scale gold-standard multilingual question-answering benchmark for evaluating the India-specific factual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Rinit Jain, Tirthraj Mahajan, Advait Joshi, Raviraj Joshi
The paper "Where's Waldo? Query-language Preference under Cross-lingual Knowledge Disparities" introduces the Waldo benchmark, a multilingual QA dataset built from Wikipedia that focuses on knowledge gaps and conflicts across languages. It evaluates eight models in five languages and finds that when a fact is missing in one language, models tend to use evidence from the other language, but when conflicting accounts exist, responses align strongly with the query language, leading to different answers for semantically identical questions. The study also explores mitigation strategies, including ablating attention heads and LoRA-based training, which can reduce the preference gap by up to 61.5%.
By Dayeon Ki, Ruochen Zhang, Silviu Cucerzan, Ryen W. White, Ning Gao