ASTRA-QA: A Benchmark for Abstract Question Answering over Documents

Document-based question answering (QA) increasingly includes abstract questions that require synthesizing scattered information from long documents or across multiple documents into coherent answers. However, this setting is still poorly supported by existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, which often lack stable abstract references or rely on coarse similarity metrics and unstable head-to-head comparisons. To alleviate this issue, we introduce ASTRA-QA, a benchmark for AbSTRAct Question Answering over documents. ASTRA-QA contains 869 QA instances over academic papers and news documents, covering five abstract question types and three controlled retrieval scopes. Each instance is equipped with explicit evaluation annotations, including answer topic sets, curated unsupported topics, and aligned evidence. Building on these annotations, ASTRA-QA assesses whether answers cover required key points and avoid unsupported content by directly scoring topic coverage and curated unsupported content, enabling scalable evaluation without exhaustive head-to-head comparisons. Experiments with representative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods spanning vanilla, graph-based, and hierarchical retrieval settings show that ASTRA-QA provides reference-grounded diagnostics for coverage, hallucination, and retrieval-scope robustness. Our dataset and code are available at https://xinyangsally.github.io/astra-benchmark.

LalaEval: A Holistic Human Evaluation Framework for Domain-Specific Large Language Models

This paper introduces LalaEval, a holistic framework designed for the human evaluation of domain-specific large language models (LLMs). LalaEval proposes a comprehensive suite of end-to-end protocols that cover five main components including domain specification, criteria establishment, benchmark dataset creation, construction of evaluation rubrics, and thorough analysis and interpretation of evaluation outcomes. This initiative aims to fill a crucial research gap by providing a systematic methodology for conducting standardized human evaluations within specific domains, a practice that, despite its widespread application, lacks substantial coverage in the literature and human evaluation are often criticized to be less reliable due to subjective factors, so standardized procedures adapted to the nuanced requirements of specific domains or even individual organizations are in great need. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the framework's application within the logistics industry, presenting domain-specific evaluation benchmarks, datasets, and a comparative analysis of LLMs for the logistics domain use, highlighting the framework's capacity to elucidate performance differences and guide model selection and development for domain-specific LLMs. Through real-world deployment, the paper underscores the framework's effectiveness in advancing the field of domain-specific LLM evaluation, thereby contributing significantly to the ongoing discussion on LLMs' practical utility and performance in domain-specific applications.