soliver1/reasoning-language-alignment

Reasoning-Language Alignment QA Benchmark

A fully monolingual German retrieval-augmented question-answering (RAG) benchmark over the fictional world of the tabletop role-playing game The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge), set on the continent of Aventurien. The world is richly documented in German yet far too niche for large language models to answer from memory, so correct answers require reading and integrating retrieved evidence, making it a clean testbed for reasoning over retrieved context.

This dataset accompanies the paper:

Investigating the Role of Reasoning-Language Alignment in Monolingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation — Oliver Hauck, Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense (2026)

• Paper: https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.03136
• Code (testbed + dataset creation pipeline): https://github.com/soliver1/reason-in-the-language-you-retrieve

⚖️ Copyright & what is (not) included

• This benchmark covers the fictional world of The Dark Eye (© Ulisses Spiele). It is not an official Ulisses Spiele product and is published solely for research and reproducibility of the paper above.
• The raw source text of the region-description books is not included, as it is copyrighted. We publish only the question, a reference answer, and derived metadata.
• The reference answers are paraphrases written by the authors; in qax the gold key-facts are highlighted with *…*.
• If you own the books, the full pipeline (raw text, chunking, and RAG context) can be regenerated with the code in the linked repository.

Configurations (subsets)

Config	Description	Rows	Book(s)
qa2	Curated QA set derived from book G01 (In den Dschungeln Meridianas), with quality rating + human approval flags	1,931	G01
qax	More complex, human-authored, multi-faceted questions	30	G01, G05, G08

qa2 fields

field	type	description
id	str	Stable unique id (qa2-<chapter>-<n>)
book	str	Book code, e.g. G01
chapter	str	Source chapter code, e.g. G01-012
question	str	German question
answer	str	Reference answer (author paraphrase of the gold answer)
rating	int	LLM self-rating of the question's quality (1–5)
reason	str	LLM rationale for the rating
user_rating	bool	Human-approval flag — true marks the final benchmark subset

qax fields

field	type	description
id	str	Stable unique id (qax-<book>-<n>)
book	str	Book code, e.g. G01
question	str	Complex German question
answer	str	Reference answer; gold key-facts highlighted with *…*

Reproducing the paper's benchmark

The experiments use the human-approved subset of the curated set (user_rating == true), together with the complex set:

from datasets import load_dataset

curated = load_dataset("soliver1/reasoning-language-alignment", "qa2", split="test")
benchmark = curated.filter(lambda x: x["user_rating"])   # 585 approved questions

complex_set = load_dataset("soliver1/reasoning-language-alignment", "qax", split="test")  # 30 complex questions

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

qa2 = load_dataset("soliver1/reasoning-language-alignment", "qa2", split="test")
print(qa2[0])

qax = load_dataset("soliver1/reasoning-language-alignment", "qax", split="test")
print(qax[0])

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the paper:

@misc{hauck2026reasoninglanguage,
  title  = {Investigating the Role of Reasoning-Language Alignment in Monolingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation},
  author = {Hauck, Oliver and Sanz-Guerrero, Mario and von der Wense, Katharina},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2610.03136},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.03136}
}

Trademark note

ⓘ DAS SCHWARZE AUGE, AVENTURIEN, DERE und THE DARK EYE sind eingetragene Marken der Ulisses Spiele GmbH. Ohne vorherige schriftliche Genehmigung der Ulisses Medien und Spiel Distribution GmbH ist eine Verwendung der genannten Markenzeichen nicht gestattet.

License

cc-by-nc-4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0).

Derived from the world of The Dark Eye; not affiliated with or endorsed by Ulisses Spiele.