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

Source: [Multilingual Question Answering in Low-Resource Settings: A Dzongkha-English Benchmark for Foundation Models](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa78ea1e209131cea7b349>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:49:02.530Z

Authors: Md. Tanzib Hosain, Rajan Das Gupta, Md. Kishor Morol

Published: 2025-05-24T11:01:05.000Z

## Abstract

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.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18638>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18638.pdf>)