MÖVE: New Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in German Public Sector
A team of researchers has released MÖVE, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models specifically for use in the German public sector. The benchmark assesses 39 models across both performance criteria—such as summarization and question answering—and governance criteria, including hallucination tendencies, energy consumption, and alignment with German constitutional values. It addresses a gap in existing benchmarks, which tend to be English-centric and focused solely on task performance rather than broader governance considerations.
MÖVE (Modelle für die Öffentliche Verwaltung Evaluieren) is a newly published benchmark aimed at guiding model selection for LLM deployment in German public administration, an area where adoption has been growing but evaluation frameworks have lagged. The benchmark evaluates 39 models across two dimensions: performance criteria covering summarization, question answering, and topic extraction, and governance criteria covering hallucination rates, energy consumption, provider transparency, and alignment with German constitutional values and knowledge of German political party positions. Ten German-language datasets were used, including gold- and silver-standard datasets constructed specifically to reflect public-administration domains. Evaluation employs a multi-metric strategy combining classical NLP metrics, embedding-based methods, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Key findings indicate that no single model dominates across all criteria, that top performers vary by task, and that model size alone is a poor predictor of quality. The researchers also conducted a meta-evaluation of the benchmark itself, examining statistical precision, judge reliability, and sensitivity to prompt formulation. MÖVE is described as a living benchmark under active development, with results publicly available online.
What's missing
It is unclear how frequently the living benchmark will be updated or how new models will be incorporated over time.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.CLCenter
M\"OVE: A Holistic LLM Benchmark for the German Public Sector
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