GomParam-v1 / README.md
Nikame Agent
GomParam-v1: First dedicated Konkani language benchmark
27c2c7a
metadata
language:
  - kok
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - text-classification
  - question-answering
  - fill-mask
task_ids:
  - multiple-choice-qa
  - natural-language-inference
  - language-modeling
pretty_name: GomParam-v1
size_categories:
  - n<1K
tags:
  - konkani
  - low-resource
  - indic-languages
  - nlp-benchmark
  - morphology
  - language-understanding
  - goa
  - devanagari
dataset_info:
  - config_name: cloze
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 25
  - config_name: morphology
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 20
  - config_name: para_qa
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 12
  - config_name: jokes_sayings
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 16
  - config_name: dialect
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 15
  - config_name: perplexity
    splits:
      - name: test
        num_examples: 30

GomParam-v1 — First Dedicated Konkani Language Benchmark

GomParam (named after Gomantak, the ancient Sanskrit name for Goa) is the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate large language models on Konkani (ISO 639-3: kok) — a severely low-resource Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers, primarily in Goa, India.

📄 Companion model: Gonyai-TEO2 — 251M parameter Konkani LLM pretrained from scratch. 📦 Companion corpus: Konkani-Books-Corpus-v2 — 86M token Konkani dataset.


Motivation

Existing Indic language benchmarks (IndicParam, MILU, IndicGenBench) contain minimal or no Konkani coverage, and those that do test world knowledge about Konkani culture rather than Konkani language ability. GomParam-v1 fills this gap by testing:

  • Morphological correctness (verb conjugation, agreement)
  • Syntactic competence (case marking, postpositions, participles)
  • Reading comprehension in Konkani
  • Cultural and pragmatic understanding (proverbs, jokes)
  • Dialect robustness (Goan vs. Mangalorean Konkani)

No world knowledge is required. Every question is answerable from language understanding alone, making GomParam-v1 a fair test for any model regardless of its encyclopedic pretraining.


Dataset Structure

Modules

Module Items Task Scoring
cloze 25 Fill-in-the-blank (4-choice) Log-likelihood MCQ
morphology 20 Verb conjugation (4-choice) Log-likelihood MCQ
para_qa 12 Paragraph comprehension (4-choice) Log-likelihood MCQ
jokes_sayings 16 Proverb/joke meaning (4-choice) Log-likelihood MCQ
dialect 15 Goan vs Mangalorean sentence pairs Perplexity consistency
perplexity 30 Held-out sentences Bits-per-token
Total 118

Random baseline: 25.0% for all MCQ tasks (4-choice).

Cloze Item Format

{
  "id": "cloze_001",
  "sentence": "तो उद्यां मुंबयीक ___ वता.",
  "candidates": ["विमानान", "विमाना", "विमानाक", "विमानानी"],
  "correct": 0,
  "category": "case_marking",
  "note": "instrumental case — travel by plane"
}

Morphology Item Format

{
  "id": "morph_001",
  "context": "हावें काल एक पुस्तक",
  "candidates": ["वाचलें", "वाचलो", "वाचली", "वाचतां"],
  "correct": 0,
  "category": "ergative_past",
  "note": "1sg ergative + neuter object past"
}

Para QA Item Format

{
  "id": "para_001",
  "passage": "गोंय हें भारताच्या पश्चिम दर्यादेगेर...",
  "question": "गोंय भारताक केन्ना मेळ्ळें?",
  "candidates": ["१९४७ वर्सा", "१९६१ वर्सा", "१९५० वर्सा", "१९७१ वर्सा"],
  "correct": 1,
  "category": "factual_extraction"
}

Dialect Item Format

{
  "id": "dialect_004",
  "goan_dev": "आमी उद्यां येतलो.",
  "mang_dev": "आमी फाल्यां येतलो.",
  "gloss": "We will come tomorrow.",
  "lexical_diff": true
}

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load individual modules
cloze    = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "cloze",         split="test")
morph    = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "morphology",    split="test")
para     = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "para_qa",       split="test")
jokes    = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "jokes_sayings", split="test")
dialect  = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "dialect",       split="test")
ppl_sents = load_dataset("omdeep22/GomParam-v1", "perplexity",  split="test")

Evaluation (log-likelihood MCQ)

import torch
import numpy as np
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

model_id = "omdeep22/Gonyai-teo2"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
model.eval()

@torch.no_grad()
def score_completion(prompt, completion):
    full = prompt + " " + completion
    p_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    f_ids = tokenizer.encode(full,   return_tensors="pt")
    if f_ids.shape[1] <= p_ids.shape[1]:
        return float("-inf")
    logits = model(f_ids).logits
    opt_start  = p_ids.shape[1]
    opt_logits = logits[0, opt_start - 1:-1, :]
    opt_targets = f_ids[0, opt_start:]
    lp = torch.nn.functional.log_softmax(opt_logits, dim=-1)
    return lp[range(len(opt_targets)), opt_targets].mean().item()

# Evaluate cloze
correct = 0
for item in cloze:
    scores = [score_completion(item["sentence"].replace("___", ""), c)
              for c in item["candidates"]]
    if np.argmax(scores) == item["correct"]:
        correct += 1
print(f"Cloze accuracy: {correct/len(cloze)*100:.2f}%")

Benchmark Results (GomParam-v1)

Results from the original paper evaluation. All models evaluated with 0-shot log-likelihood MCQ. Higher is better for all columns except PPL (lower is better).

Model Params Training PPL↓ Cloze Morph Para QA Joke/Say Dialect Composite
Random Baseline 25.0% 25.0% 25.0% 25.0% 25.0%
Qwen2.5-0.5B 0.5B Multilingual 40.0% 41.7% 83.3% 12.5% 79.0% 53.8%
Gemma-2-2B 2B Multilingual 33.3% 41.7% 100% 37.5% 68.1% 53.7%
Sarvam-1 2B Indic incl. Konkani 20.0% 25.0% 100% 12.5% 75.2% 40.9%
Gonyai-TEO2 251M Konkani only 40.0% 75.0% 83.3% 37.5% 75.7% 🏆 64.2%

Key finding: Gonyai-TEO2 (251M parameters, Konkani-only pretraining) achieves the highest composite score despite being 8× smaller than Sarvam-1 and Gemma-2-2B. Morphology accuracy (75%) demonstrates that dedicated monolingual pretraining confers strong grammatical competence that multilingual models cannot match at equivalent scale. Multilingual models retain an advantage on Para QA tasks where passage-level reading comprehension partially substitutes for language depth.


Linguistic Coverage

Script: Devanagari (primary Goan Konkani script)

Grammatical phenomena tested in Cloze & Morphology:

  • Ergative-absolutive alignment (transitive past tense)
  • Gender agreement (masculine / feminine / neuter)
  • Number agreement (singular / plural)
  • Tense-aspect (present, past, future, imperfective, pluperfect)
  • Causative constructions (direct and indirect)
  • Case marking (nominative, accusative, instrumental, genitive, locative)
  • Postpositions and adverbial particles
  • Conjunctive and temporal participles
  • Relative clause pronoun resolution
  • Negation scope

Dialect pairs cover:

  • Lexical variation (पाणी vs उदक, शाळा vs इस्कोल, पयसे vs दुडू)
  • Phonological variation (माका vs म्हाका, हावें vs हांवें)
  • Dialectal synonyms for temporal adverbs (उद्यां vs फाल्यां)

Construction Methodology

All benchmark items were hand-crafted by a native Goan Konkani speaker with reference to:

  • A Grammar of Konkani (Sardessai, 1986)
  • Goa Konkani Akademi linguistic reference materials
  • Native speaker intuition for naturalness verification

Items were designed following these principles:

  1. Language-only answerability — no item requires world knowledge
  2. Distractor plausibility — wrong options are grammatically related forms
  3. Register diversity — colloquial, narrative, descriptive, prescriptive
  4. Domain diversity — family, nature, education, culture, emotion, agriculture

Citation

If you use GomParam-v1 in your research, please cite:

@misc{borkar2026gomparam,
  title        = {GomParam-v1: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding in Konkani},
  author       = {Borkar, Omdeep},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/omdeep22/GomParam-v1}},
  note         = {First dedicated Konkani language benchmark. Companion to Gonyai-TEO2.}
}

Related Resources

Resource Link
Gonyai-TEO2 (companion model) omdeep22/Gonyai-teo2
Konkani-Books-Corpus-v2 omdeep22/Konkani-Books-Corpus-v2
Benchmark code (Kaggle) GomParam evaluation notebook

License

CC BY 4.0 — Free to use with attribution.