North or South? Diagnosing LLMs' Understanding of North Korean Language, Society, and Knowledge
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in multilingual question answering, yet their ability to understand low-resource sociolinguistic contexts remains under-explored. We study North Korea as a unique testbed where decades of division have produced distinct differences from South Korea in vocabulary, orthography, norms, and ideological discourse. We introduce LENS (Language and sociocultural Evaluation for North Korean Society), a human-validated benchmark of 1,765 questions evaluating LLMs across three dimensions: linguistic robustness, sociocultural perspective alignment, and domain-specific knowledge. Evaluating diverse recent LLMs, we find a modest performance dr...
| Authors | Kiwoong Park, Seyoung Song, Donghyun Woo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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