Chronologic: Measuring Language Models' Ability to Represent the Past
Language models are appealing tools for research on the past. But to trust the evidence a model provides, researchers need to know whether its responses fit the period represented. Validation is challenging, because this is not a task living people ordinarily perform, and because many questions have multiple correct answers. We use historical texts to develop a benchmark for a model's representation of English-language contexts 1831-1930, relying on pairwise comparisons to multiple ground truths and strong distractors to score the hardest questions in an appropriately graduated way. We find that generative tasks are harder than discriminative ones; in fact, reasoning models can typically ...
| Authors | Ted Underwood, Ziliang Qiu, Sarah Griebel et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 September 2026 |
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