README.md

metadata

license: mit
task_categories:
  - question-answering
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K

BMIKE-53: Cross-Lingual In-Context Knowledge Editing Benchmark

This repo presents the code and data for the ACL 2025 paper: "BMIKE-53: Investigating Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing with In-Context Learning".

Overview

BMIKE-53 is the first comprehensive multilingual benchmark for Cross-Lingual In-Context Knowledge Editing (IKE). It covers 53 languages and unifies three widely used knowledge editing datasets (zsRE, CounterFact, WikiFactDiff) into a consistent, multilingual format. This resource enables systematic evaluation and analysis of knowledge editing capabilities in large language models (LLMs) across a broad spectrum of languages and knowledge scenarios.

Table of Contents

• Datasets
• Supported Languages
• Benchmark Structure
• How to Use
• Citation
• License

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Datasets

• zsRE: Zero-shot relation extraction, regular fact modifications.
• CounterFact: Counterfactual (fabricated) fact edits for testing knowledge locality.
• WikiFactDiff: Real-world, temporally dynamic factual updates derived from WikiData.

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Supported Languages

BMIKE-53 covers 53 languages, including:

af, ar, az, be, bg, bn, ca, ceb, cs, cy, da, de, el, es, et, eu, fa, fi, fr, ga, gl, he, hi, hr, hu, hy, id, it, ja, ka, ko, la, lt, lv, ms, nl, pl, pt, ro, ru, sk, sl, sq, sr, sv, ta, th, tr, uk, ur, vi, zh, en.

See data/lang.json for details.

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Benchmark Structure

Data Format

Each BMIKE-53 data sample is structured as a dictionary with entries for each language (e.g., "en" for English, "de" for German, etc.). Each language-specific entry contains:

• case_id: Unique identifier for the knowledge edit case.
• subject: The subject entity or person the knowledge edit is about.
• src: The original query (reliability type), directly matching the edited knowledge.
• rephrase: A paraphrased version of the original query, testing generalization.
• old: The original (pre-edit) answer to the query.
• alt: The updated (post-edit) answer reflecting the new knowledge.
• loc: A locality control query about an unrelated subject, testing if unrelated knowledge is preserved.
• loc_ans: The correct answer for the locality query.
• port: A portability query about a related (one-hop) aspect, testing the transfer of edited knowledge.
• port_ans: The correct answer for the portability query.

All values are language-specific translations, and the same structure is repeated for each supported language.

Example:

{
  "en": {
    "case_id": 5,
    "subject": "Bhagwant Mann",
    "src": "What position did Bhagwant Mann hold?",
    "rephrase": "What role did Bhagwant Mann serve in?",
    "old": "Member of the 17th Lok Sabha",
    "alt": "Chief Minister of Punjab",
    "loc": "Who was Dipsinh Shankarsinh Rathod?",
    "loc_ans": "Member of the 17th Lok Sabha",
    "port": "Who is the current officeholder of the position previously held by Bhagwant Mann?",
    "port_ans": "Amarinder Singh"
  },
  "de": {
    "case_id": 5,
    "subject": "Bhagwant Mann",
    "src": "Welche Position hatte Bhagwant Mann inne?",
    "rephrase": "Welche Rolle hat Bhagwant Mann ausgeübt?",
    "old": "Mitglied des 17. Lok Sabha",
    "alt": "Chief Minister von Punjab",
    "loc": "Wer war Dipsinh Shankarsinh Rathod?",
    "loc_ans": "Mitglied des 17. Lok Sabha",
    "port": "Wer ist der aktuelle Amtsinhaber der Position, die zuvor von Bhagwant Mann gehalten wurde?",
    "port_ans": "Amarinder Singh"
  }
}

Files

• Benchmark data is organized under the /data/BMIKE53/ directory, with three subfolders corresponding to each dataset:
  • /CounterFact/
  • /WikiFactDiff/
  • /zsRE/
• Each dataset folder contains test files for all 53 languages, named using the pattern:
  • zsre_test_{lang}.json (e.g., zsre_test_en.json, zsre_test_de.json, etc.)
  • counterfact_test_{lang}.json
  • wikifactdiff_test_{lang}.json
• Each file contains the test set for one language in JSON format, following the unified BMIKE-53 data structure.
• Example:

  data/BMIKE53/zsRE/zsre_test_en.json
  data/BMIKE53/zsRE/zsre_test_de.json
  data/BMIKE53/CounterFact/counterfact_test_en.json
  data/BMIKE53/WikiFactDiff/wikifactdiff_test_en.json
  

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Citation

If you use BMIKE-53, please cite:

@inproceedings{nie2025bmike53,
  title={BMIKE-53: Investigating Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing with In-Context Learning},
  author={Nie, Ercong and Shao, Bo and Wang, Mingyang and Ding, Zifeng and Schmid, Helmut and Sch{\"u}tze, Hinrich},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)},
  year={2025}
}

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.