naruttamboruah/assamese-idioms-proverbs

Dubori Assamese Idioms, Proverbs & Figurative Lexicon Benchmark (813+ Entries)

This benchmark dataset addresses the acute scarcity of structured figurative language resources for Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by over 30 million people in Northeast India and recognized under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India.

Figurative constructs like proverbs (Fokora-Jojona) and idioms (Jotua Thas) are notorious failure modes for multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine translation systems. This dataset provides:

1. Native Assamese text in Unicode UTF-8.
2. Romanized transliteration for phonetic grounding.
3. Thematic classifications (Wisdom, Satire, Nature/Dak, Devotion, Daily Life).
4. Word-by-word literal English translations.
5. In-depth native Assamese semantic explanations.
6. Standard English idiomatic equivalents.
7. Real-world example sentences.

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Quick Start with Hugging Face datasets

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load dataset directly from Hugging Face Hub
dataset = load_dataset("YOUR_USERNAME/assamese-idioms-proverbs")

# Access the training split
train_data = dataset["train"]
print(f"Total samples: {len(train_data)}")

# Inspect first record
print(train_data[0])

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Dataset Schema

Feature	Type	Description
id	int32	Unique numeric identifier (1 - 813)
phrase	string	Native Assamese proverb or idiom (Eastern Nagari script)
transliteration	string	Phonetic romanization
category	string	Machine-readable topic code (wisdom, satire, nature, bhakti, daily)
category_name	string	English category title
category_as	string	Assamese category label
literal_en	string	Literal English translation
meaning_as	string	Native Assamese contextual meaning
meaning_en	string	Standard English idiomatic equivalent
example_usage	string	Authentic example sentence in Assamese

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Intended Use Cases

• LLM Evaluation & Benchmarking: Testing whether frontier LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Llama 3, Gemma 2, IndicBERT) can distinguish between literal vs. figurative meanings in Assamese.
• Machine Translation Evaluation: Evaluating quality metrics (BLEU, chrF++, COMET) on non-compositional phrases.
• Educational Tools & Apps: Semantic lookup in browser extensions and mobile apps.

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Citation Information

If you utilize this benchmark dataset in academic publications or NLP software, please cite:

@dataset{dubori_assamese_idioms_2026,
  author       = {Boruah, Naruttam},
  title        = {Dubori Assamese Idioms, Proverbs & Figurative Lexicon Benchmark},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23032165},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/dubori/assamese-idioms-proverbs}},
  note         = {Companion repository to Assamese & English Digital Lexicon (https://assamesedictionary.org)}
}