RepLiQA: A Question-Answering Dataset for Benchmarking LLMs on Unseen
  Reference Content
Authors: name: Joao Monteiro; name: Pierre-Andre Noel; name: Etienne Marcotte; name: Sai Rajeswar; name: Valentina Zantedeschi; name: David Vazquez; name: Nicolas Chapados; name: Christopher Pal; name: Perouz Taslakian
Published: 2024-06-17 17:52:54

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of
which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includes
encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (e.g.,
Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for
evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have
leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster
sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named
RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a
collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to
the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in
RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and
depicting an imaginary scenario (e.g., a news article) absent from the
internet; (2) a question about the document's topic; (3) a ground-truth answer
derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph
extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate
answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the
provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several
state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of
various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting.
Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.