LakeQuest: A Three-Domain Benchmark for Grounded Question Answering across Data Lakes

Jul 15, 2026

Researchers introduce LakeQuest, a human-validated benchmark containing 9,846 question-answer pairs across three domains: AI/ML metadata, retail banking, and biomedical drug information. The benchmark is designed to evaluate end-to-end retrieve-and-synthesize pipelines over heterogeneous, weakly structured data lakes. Baseline evaluations show that even with high-quality retrieval, current QA systems often fail at complex reasoning tasks such as relation chaining, policy grounding, and joint tabular question answering.

Why it matters: LakeQuest reveals critical weaknesses in current QA systems when applied to real-world, weakly structured data lakes, emphasizing the need for more robust discovery and synthesis methods.

Full story at: arXiv Computation and Language ↗