To What Extent Do Large Language Models Understand Bangla Idioms?

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.03410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language, reflecting cultural nuances and posing unique challenges for computational models, particularly in low-resource languages. In this paper, we present the first large-scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, complemented by a synthetic multiple-choice question (MCQ) dataset for idiom meaning identification. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of recent large language models (LLMs) across three idiom-related tasks: paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and meaning identification, leveraging zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies. Our results reveal substantial variability in model performance, with no single LLM consistently outperforming others across all tasks. Notably, Phi-