ETRQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Event Temporal Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models

Event temporal reasoning (ETR) aims to model and reason about the relationships between events and time, as well as between events in the real world. Proficiency in ETR is a significant indicator that a large language model (LLM) truly understands the physical world. Previous question-answering datasets available for evaluating the ETR ability lack a systematic taxonomy and pay limited attention to compound questions. In this paper, we propose a unified taxonomy for event temporal questions and construct a comprehensive benchmark ETRQA, to evaluate the ETR abilities of LLMs based on this taxonomy. ETRQA not only inherits and expands the evaluation content of existing datasets but also contains multiple categories of compound questions. We evaluate two leading LLM series, Llama and Qwen, on ETRQA across various settings. Our experimental results indicate that large-scale LLMs exhibit certain ETR abilities. Yet they do not perform well in solving specific types of reasoning tasks, including reasoning involving time spans, reasoning for compound questions, and reasoning with fine temporal granularity. Additionally, we hope ETRQA can benefit the temporal reasoning research community for future studies. 1