Paper ID: 2409.15334

Evaluating Large Language Models with Tests of Spanish as a Foreign Language: Pass or Fail?

Marina Mayor-Rocher, Nina Melero, Elena Merino-Gómez, María Grandury, Javier Conde, Pedro Reviriego

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been profusely evaluated on their ability to answer questions on many topics and their performance on different natural language understanding tasks. Those tests are usually conducted in English, but most LLM users are not native English speakers. Therefore, it is of interest to analyze how LLMs understand other languages at different levels: from paragraphs to morphems. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs in TELEIA, a recently released benchmark with similar questions to those of Spanish exams for foreign students, covering topics such as reading comprehension, word formation, meaning and compositional semantics, and grammar. The results show that LLMs perform well at understanding Spanish but are still far from achieving the level of a native speaker in terms of grammatical competence.

Submitted: Sep 8, 2024