Will It Still Be True Tomorrow? Multilingual Evergreen Question Classification to Improve Trustworthy QA

Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate in question answering (QA) tasks. A key yet underexplored factor contributing to this is the temporality of questions -- whether they are evergreen (answers remain stable over time) or mutable (answers change). In this work, we introduce EverGreenQA, the first multilingual QA dataset with evergreen labels, supporting both evaluation and training. Using EverGreenQA, we benchmark 12 modern LLMs to assess whether they encode question temporality explicitly (via verbalized judgments) or implicitly (via uncertainty signals). We also train EG-E5, a lightweight multilingual classifier that achieves SoTA performance on this task. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of evergreen classification across three applications: improving self-knowledge estimation, filtering QA datasets, and explaining GPT-4o retrieval behavior.

@article{pletenev2025_2505.21115,
  title={ Will It Still Be True Tomorrow? Multilingual Evergreen Question Classification to Improve Trustworthy QA },
  author={ Sergey Pletenev and Maria Marina and Nikolay Ivanov and Daria Galimzianova and Nikita Krayko and Mikhail Salnikov and Vasily Konovalov and Alexander Panchenko and Viktor Moskvoretskii },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21115},
  year={ 2025 }
}