Subhajit Roy


2025

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Studying the capabilities of Large Language Models in solving Combinatorics Problems posed in Hindi
Yash Kumar | Subhajit Roy
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages

There are serious attempts at improving the mathematical acumen of LLMs in questions posed in English. In India, where a large fraction of the students study in regional languages, there is a need to assess and improve these state-of-the-art LLMs in their reasoning abilities in regional languages as well. As Hindi is a language predominantly used in India, this study proposes a new dataset on mathematical combinatorics problems consisting of a parallel corpus of problems in English and Hindi collected from NCERT textbooks. We evaluate the “raw” single-shot capabilities of these LLMs in solving problems posed in Hindi. Then we apply a chain-of-thought approach to evaluate the improvement in the abilities of the LLMs at solving combinatorics problems posed in Hindi. Our study reveals that while smaller LLMs like LLaMa3-8B shows a significant drop in performance when questions are posed in Hindi, versus questions posed in English, larger LLMs like GPT4-turbo shows excellent capabilities at solving problems posed in Hindi, almost at par its abilities in English. We make two primary inferences from our study: (1) large models like GPT4 can be readily deployed in schools where Hindi is the primary language of study, especially in rural India; (2) there is a need to improve the multilingual capabilities of smaller models. As these smaller open-source models can be deployed on not so expensive GPUs, it is easier for schools to provide these models to the students, and hence, the latter is an important direction for future research.