Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Figures of Speech (FoS) consist of multi-word phrases that are deeply intertwined with culture.While Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performs relatively well with the figurative expressions of high-resource languages, it often faces challenges when dealing with low-resource languages like Sinhala due to limited available data.To address this limitation, we introduce SINFOS, a dataset of 2,344 Sinhala figures of speech with cultural and cross-lingual annotations.We examine this dataset to classify the cultural origins of the FoS and to identify their cross-lingual equivalents.Additionally, we have developed a binary classifier to differentiate between two types of FoS in the dataset, achieving an accuracy rate of approximately 92%.We also evaluate the performance of existing LLMs on this dataset.Our findings reveal significant shortcomings in the current capabilities of LLMs, as these models often struggle to accurately convey idiomatic meanings.By making this dataset publicly available, we offer a crucial benchmark for future research in lowresource NLP and culturally aware machine translation.
Institutions: Informatics Institute of Technology, University of Moratuwa
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7140146797
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