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Chronologic: Measuring Language Models' Ability to Represent the Past

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 19, 2026 · UTC

Language models are appealing tools for research on the past. But to trust the evidence a model provides, researchers need to know whether its responses fit the period represented. Validation is challenging, because this is not a task living people ordinarily perform, and because many questions have multiple correct answers. We use historical texts to develop a benchmark for a model's representation of English-language contexts 1831-1930, relying on pairwise comparisons to multiple ground truths and strong distractors to score the hardest questions in an appropriately graduated way. We find th

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