CNeo-Bench: Diagnosing Large Language Models on Chinese Neologisms

Abstract:Chinese neologisms exploit diverse and unique linguistic mechanisms, such as phonetic substitution (e.g., 886 for ``bye-bye'') and visual character decomposition that are rare in other languages. We introduce CNeo-Bench, a benchmark of 4,759 such neologisms with reference definitions, organized into five top-level categories and nine subcategories by the linguistic mechanism behind each expression. CNeo-Bench is paired with a two-tier evaluation framework that separates whether a model can describe a neologism from whether it can operate on its underlying mechanism. Evaluating 18 LLMs, we find that Chinese neologisms remain an open challenge; most models fall below 40\% on definition generation, and on several subcategories a systematic recognition-manipulation gap emerges: models describe neologisms correctly but, in source-form restoration tasks, substitute a semantic equivalent (paraphrase) for the source form rather than producing the source form itself. A few-shot analysis on 1,058 hard items shows that in-context examples can solve many difficult cases, but leave a noticeable portion of errors remaining, indicating challenges beyond prompting alone can address.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.28053 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.28053v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28053 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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