TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models

With the recent surge in the development of large language models, the need for comprehensive and language-specific evaluation benchmarks has become critical. While significant progress has been made in evaluating English language models, benchmarks for other languages, particularly those with unique linguistic characteristics such as Turkish, remain less developed. Our study introduces TurkBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of generative large language models in the Turkish language. TurkBench involves 8,151 data samples across 21 distinct subtasks. These are organized under six main categories of evaluation: Knowledge, Language Understanding, Reasoning, Content Moderation, Turkish Grammar and Vocabulary, and Instruction Following. The diverse range of tasks and the culturally relevant data would provide researchers and developers with a valuable tool for evaluating their models and identifying areas for improvement. We further publish our benchmark for online submissions at https://huggingface.co/turkbench

TabiBERT: A Large-Scale ModernBERT Foundation Model and Unified Benchmarking Framework for Turkish

Since the inception of BERT, encoder-only Transformers have evolved significantly in computational efficiency, training stability, and long-context modeling. ModernBERT consolidates these advances by integrating Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), FlashAttention, and refined normalization. Despite these developments, Turkish NLP lacks a monolingual encoder trained from scratch incorporating such modern architectural paradigms. This work introduces TabiBERT, a monolingual Turkish encoder based on ModernBERT architecture trained from scratch on a large, curated corpus. TabiBERT is pre-trained on one trillion tokens sampled from an 84.88B token multi-domain corpus: web text (73%), scientific publications (20%), source code (6%), and mathematical content (0.3%). The model supports 8,192-token context length (16x original BERT), achieves up to 2.65x inference speedup, and reduces GPU memory consumption, enabling larger batch sizes. We introduce TabiBench with 28 datasets across eight task categories with standardized splits and protocols, evaluated using GLUE-style macro-averaging. TabiBERT attains 77.58 on TabiBench, outperforming BERTurk by 1.62 points and establishing state-of-the-art on five of eight categories: question answering (+9.55), code retrieval (+2.41), and document retrieval (+0.60). Compared with task-specific prior best results, including specialized models like TurkishBERTweet, TabiBERT achieves +1.47 average improvement, indicating robust cross-domain generalization. We release model weights, training configurations, and evaluation code for transparent, reproducible Turkish encoder research.

TURNA: A Turkish Encoder-Decoder Language Model for Enhanced Understanding and Generation

The recent advances in natural language processing have predominantly favored well-resourced English-centric models, resulting in a significant gap with low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce the language model TURNA, which is developed for the low-resource language Turkish and is capable of both natural language understanding and generation tasks. TURNA is pretrained with an encoder-decoder architecture based on the unified framework UL2 with a diverse corpus that we specifically curated for this purpose. We evaluated TURNA with three generation tasks and five understanding tasks for Turkish. The results show that TURNA outperforms several multilingual models in both understanding and generation tasks, and competes with monolingual Turkish models in understanding tasks. TURNA is made available at https://huggingface.co/boun-tabi-LMG/TURNA .