HistoryBankQA: Multilingual Temporal Question Answering on Historical Events
Biswadip Mandal, Anant Khandelwal, Manish Gupta · 2026
Temporal reasoning over historical events is vital for temporal NLP tasks such as event extraction, entity linking, question answering (QA), timeline summarization, event clustering, and natural language inference.However, benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on temporal reasoning remain limited.Existing datasets are small, lack multilingual coverage, and focus on recent events.To address this, we introduce HistoryBank, a multilingual database of 10M+ historical events sourced from Wikipedia timelines and infoboxes.Our database provides unprecedented coverage in both historical depth and linguistic breadth with 10 languages.We also present a comprehensive benchmark covering 6 temporal QA tasks across all languages, evaluating models like LLaMA-3-8B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen3-8B, and GPT4o.GPT-4o consistently performs best; Gemma-2 leads among smaller models.Our work offers a rich resource for advancing multilingual, temporally-aware language understanding of historical events.To support further research, we publicly release our code and datasets 1 .Question Type Question Answer FactQA I'm looking for the date of the release of the Goodnight Punpun Omnibus 1.When was it released?{'year': '2016', 'month': '03', 'day': '04'} DurationQA What was the time duration between the release of the single "Happy Happy" and the release of the single "Fake &True"?start_date={'year': '2019', 'month': '06', 'day': '12'}, end_date={'year': '2019', 'month': '10', 'day': '18'} RelationQA Compare Duration Which event span is of longer duration: "Agnes van Ardenne was born" to "Agnes van Ardenne started her earlier term as Member of the House of Representatives", or "Agnes van Ardenne ended her earlier term as Member of the House of Representatives" to "Agnes van Ardenne started her term as Member of the House of Representatives"? "Agnes van Ardenne was born" to "Agnes van Ardenne started her earlier term as Member of the House of Representatives".Duration Diff What is the difference in duration between "A new session of the Alabama Legislature began" to "The next election for the Alabama Senate is scheduled", and "Anthony Daniels was elected as House Minority Leader of Alabama" to "The last election for the Alabama Senate was held".(in days) in the context of "Alabama Legislature"?762 Gap Between What is the gap in days between "José Luis Soro became the leader of Chunta Aragonesista" to "Maru Díaz became the leader of Podemos-Green Alliance in Aragon."and "Tomás Guitarte became the leader of Teruel Existe" to "Alberto Izquierdo became the leader of the Aragonese Party.", in the context of "2023 Aragonese regional election"?1522 Inclusion Which event's time span includes the other: "June 2009 Extra Session of the 99th Wisconsin Legislature ended" to "December 2009 Special Session of the 99th Wisconsin Legislature began", or "Election for the 99th Wisconsin Legislature was held" to "The term of the 99th Wisconsin Legislature ended.", in the context of "99th Wisconsin Legislature"?Election for the 99th Wisconsin Legislature was held to The term of the 99th Wisconsin Legislature ended.Order Span End Which event span ended last: "The album '100 Reasons to Live' by Gareth Emery was released" to "The single 'Far From Home' by Gareth Emery feat.Gavrielle was released", or "The single 'Hands' by Gareth Emery &Alastor feat.London Thor was released" to "The single 'Save Me' by Gareth Emery was released.", in the context of "100 Reasons to Live"? "The single 'Hands' by Gareth Emery &Alastor feat.London Thor was released" to "The single 'Save Me' by Gareth Emery was released."Order Span Start Which event span started earlier: "The album '100 Reasons to Live' by Gareth Emery was released" to "The single 'Far From Home' by Gareth Emery feat.Gavrielle was released", or "The single 'Hands' by Gareth Emery &Alastor feat.London Thor was released" to "The single 'Save Me' by Gareth Emery was released.", in the context of "100 Reasons to Live"? "The single 'Hands' by Gareth Emery &Alastor feat.London Thor was released" to "The single 'Save Me' by Gareth Emery was released."Overlap How many days do "The single 'Hands' by Gareth Emery &Alastor feat.London Thor was released" to "The single 'Far From Home' by Gareth Emery feat.Gavrielle was released.",and "The album '100 Reasons to Live' by Gareth Emery was released" to "The single 'Save Me' by Gareth Emery was released."overlap, in the context of "100 Reasons to Live"? 29 CountQA The following is a list of historical events.Each line includes a description and the title of the article it comes from.(1) Event about 'Sean Kingston (album)': The single "Beautiful Girls" by Sean Kingston was released.(2) Event about 'Week End (X Japan song)': The song "Week End" by X Japan was released.(3) Event about 'Lucy McEvoy': Lucy McEvoy was nominated for the AFL Women's Rising Star award.(4) Event about 'BL 5.4-inch howitzer': The Ordnance BL 5.4-inch howitzer was used in the Second Boer War.(5) Event about 'Holten Castenschiold': Holten Castenschiold began his term as the 6th President of the Danish Olympic Committee.(6) Event about 'William L. Baird': William Lewis Baird began his term as the 19th Mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts.(7) Event about 'Jung Yeon-kyung': Jung Yeon-kyung was born.Provide the count of the number of events that occurred during the 19th century. 2 SequenceQA Sort the events by the time they took place.Each event is accompanied by a description and the title of the article it comes from.Return the correct chronological order by listing the event numbers, like (2) (1) (3).(1) Event about 'Paaliaq': Paaliaq was discovered.(2) Event about 'Bob Chakales': Bob Chakales was born.(3) Event about 'Dark Valley': The film "Dark Valley" was released.(2) (3) (1) RecurrenceQA The following event includes the article title and event description.Event about '2008 Iranian legislative election': The second round of the 2008 Iranian legislative election was held.Identify the year when the previous edition of the event took place.Provide the year as your answer.