arXiv AI

VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages

VakyArth is the first pragmatic benchmark for Indic languages, covering Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. It tests models on five pragmatic phenomena—deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics, and coherence—using multiple-choice questions, natural language inference, and translation tasks authored by native speakers. Evaluation of multilingual LLMs shows consistent failures on pragmatic meanings rooted in Indic linguistic and cultural conventions, with systematic differences across languages and tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

L3Cube-IndicQuest v2: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Factual Knowledge of Large Language Models Across Indic Languages

arXiv:2608. 15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present L3Cube-IndicQuest v2, a large-scale gold-standard multilingual question-answering benchmark for evaluating the India-specific factual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs).

By Rinit Jain, Tirthraj Mahajan, Advait Joshi, Raviraj Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

VIVID: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark Exposing the Figurative Language Gap in Vietnamese NLP

arXiv:2608. 03095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present VIVID (Vietnamese Idioms for Validation and Interpretation Depth), the first systematic benchmark for evaluating culturally grounded figurative language understanding in Vietnamese.

By Tu Tran Do, Nhat Ngoc Nguyen, Khanh-Tung Tran, Hoang D. Nguyen, Tu Minh Phuong, Long Hoang Dang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

MemeCULT-1K: Benchmarking South Asian Cultural Context and Humor Understanding of Multimodal Models

arXiv:2609.01772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meme understanding goes beyond recognizing visual content or literal text; it requires implicit cultural knowledge and pragmatic inference that most vi...

By Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Mehedi Ahamed, Radib Bin Kabir, Mueeze Al Mushabbir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed
arXiv AI
Aug 20

NE-BERT: A Multilingual Language Model for Nine Northeast Indian Languages

NE‑BERT is a multilingual encoder trained on about 8.3 million sentences from nine Northeast Indian languages plus Hindi and English. Using weighted sampling and a custom SentencePiece tokenizer, it achieves significantly lower perplexity than IndicBERT‑V2, MuRIL, and mBERT, and improves tokenization fertility. The model also addresses vocabulary fragmentation in extremely low‑resource languages through aggressive upsampling, and its effectiveness is validated on part‑of‑speech tagging for three of the languages.

By Badal Nyalang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

IKS-Instruct: A 24,000-Example Multilingual Dataset for Teaching Language Models Indian Knowledge Systems

arXiv:2607. 23322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction tuning has become the standard method for adapting large language models to follow human intent, yet existing instruction datasets are dominated by English-language general-knowledge tasks and lack coverage of specialized pedagogical domains.

By Shwetha Singaravelu, Gayathri Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett