Let’s Play Across Cultures: A Large Multilingual, Multicultural Benchmark for Assessing Language Models’ Understanding of Sports

AbstractLanguage Models (LMs) are primarily evaluated on globally popular sports, often overlooking regional and indigenous sporting traditions. To address this gap, we introduce CultSportQA, a benchmark designed to assess LMs’ understanding of traditional sports across 60 countries and 6 continents, encompassing four distinct cultural categories. The dataset features 33,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across text and image modalities, categorized into primarily three key types: history-based, rule-based, and scenario-based. To evaluate model performance, we employ zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across a diverse set of Large Language Models (LLMs), Small Language Models (SLMs), and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLMs). By providing a comprehensive multilingual and multicultural sports benchmark, CultSportQA establishes a new standard for assessing AI’s ability to understand and reason about traditional sports. The dataset will be publicly available, fostering research in culturally aware AI systems.