Probing the Limits of Multilingual Language Understanding: Low-Resource Language Proverbs as LLM Benchmark for AI Wisdom

Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Hariram Veeramani, Surabhi Adhikari, Imran Razzak, Usman Naseem


Abstract
Understanding and interpreting culturally specific language remains a significant challenge for multilingual natural language processing (NLP) systems, particularly for less-resourced languages. To address this problem, this paper introduces PRONE, a novel dataset of 2,830 Nepali proverbs, and evaluates the performance of various language models (LMs) in two tasks: (i) identifying the correct meaning of a proverb from multiple choices, and (ii) categorizing proverbs into predefined thematic categories. The models, including both open-source and proprietary, were tested in zero-shot and few-shot settings with prompts in English and Nepali. While models like GPT-4o demonstrated promising results and achieved the highest performance among LMs, they still fall short of human-level accuracy in understanding and categorizing culturally nuanced content, highlighting the need for more inclusive NLP.
Anthology ID:
2025.codi-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Michael Strube, Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Amir Zeldes, Chuyuan Li
Venues:
CODI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
120–129
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.codi-1.11/
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Cite (ACL):
Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Hariram Veeramani, Surabhi Adhikari, Imran Razzak, and Usman Naseem. 2025. Probing the Limits of Multilingual Language Understanding: Low-Resource Language Proverbs as LLM Benchmark for AI Wisdom. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025), pages 120–129, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Probing the Limits of Multilingual Language Understanding: Low-Resource Language Proverbs as LLM Benchmark for AI Wisdom (Thapa et al., CODI 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.codi-1.11.pdf