Ahaj Mahhin Faiak


2025

pdf bib
SOMAJGYAAN: A Dataset for Evaluating LLMs on Bangla Culture, Social Knowledge, and Low-Resource Language Adaptation
Fariha Anjum Shifa | Muhtasim Ibteda Shochcho | Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean | Mohammad Ashfaq Ur Rahman | Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder | Ahaj Mahhin Faiak | Md Fahim | M Ashraful Amin | Amin Ahsan Ali | Akmmahbubur Rahman
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

Despite significant progress in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge and evaluation continue to be centered around high-resource languages, leaving critical gaps in low-resource settings. This raises questions about how effectively LLMs handle subjects that require locally relevant knowledge. To address this challenge, we need a robust dataset that reflects the knowledge of underrepresented regions such as Bangladesh. In this paper, we present ***SOMAJGYAAN***, a Bangla multiple-choice dataset consisting of 4,234 questions, annotated across five levels of difficulty. The questions are drawn from Bangladesh’s National Curriculum and Global Studies textbooks, covering a wide range of domains including History, Geography, Economics, Social Studies, Politics and Law, and Miscellaneous topics. Difficulty levels were assigned by four expert annotators to minimize annotation bias. The experiments reveal that closed-source LLMs perform better than open-source LLMs. While fine-tuning open-source models on improves their performance, they still fall short of matching closed-source LLMs. Our findings highlight the importance of culturally grounded evaluation datasets and task-specific adaptation to improve LLM performance in low-resource language settings.