# No Shortcuts to Culture: Indonesian Multi-hop Question Answering for Complex Cultural Understanding Source: [No Shortcuts to Culture: Indonesian Multi-hop Question Answering for Complex Cultural Understanding]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-02-07T06:00:02.360Z Authors: Vynska Amalia Permadi, Xingwei Tan, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Nikos Aletras Published: 2026-02-03T16:32:00.000Z ## Abstract Understanding culture requires reasoning across context, tradition, and implicit social knowledge, far beyond recalling isolated facts. Yet most culturally focused question answering (QA) benchmarks rely on single-hop questions, which may allow models to exploit shallow cues rather than demonstrate genuine cultural reasoning. In this work, we introduce ID-MoCQA, the first large-scale multi-hop QA dataset for assessing the cultural understanding of large language models (LLMs), grounded in Indonesian traditions and available in both English and Indonesian. We present a new framework that systematically transforms single-hop cultural questions into multi-hop reasoning chains spanning six clue types (e.g., commonsense, temporal, geographical). Our multi-stage validation pipeline, combining expert review and LLM-as-a-judge filtering, ensures high-quality question-answer pairs. Our evaluation across state-of-the-art models reveals substantial gaps in cultural reasoning, particularly in tasks requiring nuanced inference. ID-MoCQA provides a challenging and essential benchmark for advancing the cultural competency of LLMs. ## 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]() [PDF]()