aiqbench analysis
This research addresses a critical gap in low-resource language models by introducing the Culturally Entangled Homograph (CEH) dataset to tackle systematic bias where Bangla words function as both names and common nouns. The study demonstrates that distilling cultural reasoning into small-scale models via contrastive chain-of-thought prompting can drastically reduce this dominant-meaning error, proving that specific pretraining data alone is insufficient for true cultural grounding in AI systems.
When a Name Is Not a Name: A Benchmark Dataset and Distilled Reasoning for Culturally Entangled Bangla Homographs in Low-Resource LLMs
arXiv:2607.17828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many Bangla words are at once personal names and culturally loaded common nouns, "Maya" is both a girl's name and a word for affectionate compassion. Choosing the right reading demands cultural knowledge that is scarce in the pretraining data of modern language models. We introduce Culturally Entangled Homograph (CEH) disambiguation and build a Bangla benchmark of 1,516 expert-verified sentences (3,032 labelled occurrences) in which one word appears twice with two distinct readings, each labelled with a culturally grounded category and an explanation of the reasoning behind it. Across open- and closed-source models, we find a systematic dominant-meaning bias: models default to the common-noun sense and overlook the name. A Bangla-specific model fails under every prompting regime we test, showing that language-specific pretraining alone does not confer cultural grounding. We further show that contrastive chain-of-thought prompting can sharply reduce this bias without training, and that distilling cultural explanations teaches small (1-3B) models to reason toward the correct reading rather than memorise labels, cutting dominant-meaning bias from as high as 100% to under 5% and turning the failed Bangla-specific model into our strongest system. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ashuvo25/BanglaCEH.
Abstract:Many Bangla words are at once personal names and culturally loaded common nouns, "Maya" is both a girl's name and a word for affectionate compassion. Choosing the right reading demands cultural knowledge that is scarce in the pretraining data of modern language models. We introduce Culturally Entangled Homograph (CEH) disambiguation and build a Bangla benchmark of 1,516 expert-verified sentences (3,032 labelled occurrences) in which one word appears twice with two distinct readings, each labelled with a culturally grounded category and an explanation of the reasoning behind it. Across open- and closed-source models, we find a systematic dominant-meaning bias: models default to the common-noun sense and overlook the name. A Bangla-specific model fails under every prompting regime we test, showing that language-specific pretraining alone does not confer cultural grounding. We further show that contrastive chain-of-thought prompting can sharply reduce this bias without training, and that distilling cultural explanations teaches small (1-3B) models to reason toward the correct reading rather than memorise labels, cutting dominant-meaning bias from as high as 100% to under 5% and turning the failed Bangla-specific model into our strongest system. Dataset and code are available at this https URL.
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2607.17828 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.17828v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17828 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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