# HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events

Source: [HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7b511e209131cea87bd3>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:21.680Z

Authors: Biswadip Mandal, Anant Khandelwal, Manish Gupta

Published: 2025-09-16T06:24:29.000Z

## Abstract

Temporal reasoning about historical events is a critical skill for NLP tasks like event extraction, historical entity linking, temporal question answering, timeline summarization, temporal event clustering and temporal natural language inference. Yet efforts on benchmarking temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are rather limited. Existing temporal reasoning datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage and focus more on contemporary events. To address these limitations, we present HistoryBank, a multilingual database of 10M+ historical events extracted from Wikipedia timeline pages and article infoboxes. Our database provides unprecedented coverage in both historical depth and linguistic breadth with 10 languages. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive question answering benchmark for temporal reasoning across all languages. This benchmark covers a diverse set of 6 temporal QA reasoning tasks, and we evaluate a suite of popular language models (LLaMA-3-8B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9b, Qwen3-8B, GPT4o) to assess their performance on these tasks. As expected GPT4o performs best across all answer types and languages; Gemma-2 outperforms the other small language models. Our work aims to provide a comprehensive resource for advancing multilingual and temporally-aware natural language understanding of historical events. To facilitate further research, we will make our code and datasets publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12720>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12720.pdf>)