# Multilingual Question Answering in Low-Resource Settings: A Dzongkha-English Benchmark for Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18638/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03057/) (2022)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00277/) (2019)
- [Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15425/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03439/) (2023)
- [Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13707/) (2023)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05409/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Only Pass Primary School Exams in Indonesia: A Comprehensive Test on IndoMMLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04928/) (2023)
- [RECIPE: How to Integrate ChatGPT into EFL Writing Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11583/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ViMoNet: A Multimodal Vision-Language Framework for Human Behavior Understanding from Motion and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09818/) (2025)
- [GANDiff FR: Hybrid GAN Diffusion Synthesis for Causal Bias Attribution in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11334/) (2025)
- [Cross-Lingual Probing and Community-Grounded Analysis of Gender Bias in Low-Resource Bengali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17764/) (2026)
- [Pattern Recognition Tasks with Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27816/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we provide DZEN, a dataset of parallel Dzongkha and English test questions for Bhutanese middle and high school students. The over 5K questions in our collection span a variety of scientific topics and include factual, application, and reasoning-based questions. We use our parallel dataset to test a number of Large Language Models (LLMs) and find a significant performance difference between the models in English and Dzongkha. We also look at different prompting strategies and discover that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting works well for reasoning questions but less well for factual ones. We also find that adding English translations enhances the precision of Dzongkha question responses. Our results point to exciting avenues for further study to improve LLM performance in Dzongkha and, more generally, in low-resource languages. We release the dataset at: https://github.com/kraritt/llm_dzongkha_evaluation.