license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
- eu
tags:
- Variation
pretty_name: BasPhyCo
configs:
- config_name: eu
data_files:
- split: test
path:
- data/basphyco.jsonl
- config_name: eu_west
data_files:
- split: test
path:
- data/basphyco-western.jsonl
BasPhyCo
This repository contains the data and code for the paper Physical Commonsense Reasoning for Lower-Resourced Languages and Dialects: a Study on Basque.
Physical commonsense reasoning represents a fundamental capability of human intelligence, enabling individuals to understand their environment, predict future events, and navigate physical spaces. Recent years have witnessed growing interest in reasoning tasks within Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, no prior research has examined the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on non-question-answering (non-QA) physical commonsense reasoning tasks in low-resource languages such as Basque. Taking the Italian GITA as a starting point, this paper addresses this gap by presenting BasPhyCo, the first non-QA physical commonsense reasoning dataset for Basque, available in both standard and dialectal variants. We evaluate model performance across three hierarchical levels of commonsense understanding: (1) distinguishing between plausible and implausible narratives (accuracy), (2) identifying the conflicting element that renders a narrative implausible (consistency), and (3) determining the specific physical state that creates the implausibility (verifiability). These tasks were assessed using multiple multilingual LLMs as well as models pretrained specifically for Italian and Basque. Results indicate that, in terms of verifiability, LLMs exhibit limited physical commonsense capabilities in low-resource languages such as Basque, especially when processing dialectal variants.
Data
We have done our evaluation on the original Italian dataset, as well as in two novel Basque adaptations:
- Standard Basque: This was manually translated from Italian to Standard Basque by a proefessional linguist. Additional cultural adaptations were also considered.
- Western Basque: The Standard Basque dataset was automatically adapted into the Western dialect of Basque.
Citation
The paper that explains the dataset and experiments can be cited as follows:
@misc{bengoetxea2026physicalcommonsensereasoninglowerresourced,
title={Physical Commonsense Reasoning for Lower-Resourced Languages and Dialects: a Study on Basque},
author={Jaione Bengoetxea and Itziar Gonzalez-Dios and Rodrigo Agerri},
year={2026},
eprint={2602.14812},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14812},
}