Consolidating and Developing Benchmarking Datasets for the Nepali Natural Language Understanding Tasks

Jinu Nyachhyon, Mridul Sharma, Prajwal Thapa, Bal Krishna Bal


Abstract
The Nepali language has distinct linguistic features, especially its complex script (Devanagari script), morphology, and various dialects, which pose a unique challenge for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. While the Nepali Language Understanding Evaluation (Nep-gLUE) benchmark provides a foundation for evaluating models, it remains limited in scope, covering four tasks. This restricts their utility for comprehensive assessments of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. To address this limitation, we introduce twelve new datasets, creating a new benchmark, the Nepali Language Understanding Evaluation (NLUE) benchmark for evaluating the performance of models across a diverse set of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. The added tasks include Single-Sentence Classification, Similarity and Paraphrase Tasks, Natural Language Inference (NLI), and General Masked Evaluation Task (GMET). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that existing top models struggle with the added complexity of these tasks. We also find that the best multilingual model outperforms the best monolingual models across most tasks, highlighting the need for more robust solutions tailored to the Nepali language. This expanded benchmark sets a new standard for evaluating, comparing, and advancing models, contributing significantly to the broader goal of advancing NLP research for low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.119
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1906–1925
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.119/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinu Nyachhyon, Mridul Sharma, Prajwal Thapa, and Bal Krishna Bal. 2025. Consolidating and Developing Benchmarking Datasets for the Nepali Natural Language Understanding Tasks. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1906–1925, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Consolidating and Developing Benchmarking Datasets for the Nepali Natural Language Understanding Tasks (Nyachhyon et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.119.pdf