English

NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmark

Computation and Language 2025-06-06 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This paper introduces NorEval, a new and comprehensive evaluation suite for large-scale standardized benchmarking of Norwegian generative language models (LMs). NorEval consists of 24 high-quality human-created datasets -- of which five are created from scratch. In contrast to existing benchmarks for Norwegian, NorEval covers a broad spectrum of task categories targeting Norwegian language understanding and generation, establishes human baselines, and focuses on both of the official written standards of the Norwegian language: Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk. All our datasets and a collection of over 100 human-written prompts are integrated into LM Evaluation Harness, ensuring flexible and reproducible evaluation. We describe the NorEval design and present the results of benchmarking 19 open-source pre-trained and instruction-tuned LMs for Norwegian in various scenarios. Our benchmark, evaluation framework, and annotation materials are publicly available.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.07749,
  title  = {NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmark},
  author = {Vladislav Mikhailov and Tita Enstad and David Samuel and Hans Christian Farsethås and Andrey Kutuzov and Erik Velldal and Lilja Øvrelid},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07749},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted for Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:53:39.953Z