premmm/nepali-bench
NepaliBench 🏔️ A rigorous evaluation benchmark for Nepali language models. Why this exists There is no standard, publicly reproducible benchmark for evaluating Nepali LLMs. This dataset was created after a systematic evaluation of himalaya-ai's NanochatGPT and Gemma fine-tune revealed that models claiming Nepali capability had no shared evaluation standard to measure against. Dataset 100 carefully curated evaluation examples across 8 categories:… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/premmm/nepali-bench.
NepaliBench 🏔️
A rigorous evaluation benchmark for Nepali language models.
Why this exists
There is no standard, publicly reproducible benchmark for evaluating Nepali LLMs. This dataset was created after a systematic evaluation of himalaya-ai's NanochatGPT and Gemma fine-tune revealed that models claiming Nepali capability had no shared evaluation standard to measure against.
Dataset
100 carefully curated evaluation examples across 8 categories:
Schema
{
"id": "NB-FACT-001",
"category": "Nepali Factual Knowledge",
"subcategory": "geography",
"prompt_ne": "सगरमाथाको उचाइ कति छ?",
"prompt_en": "What is the height of Mount Everest?",
"reference_answer_ne": "८,८४८.८६ मिटर",
"reference_answer_en": "8,848.86 meters",
"difficulty": "easy",
"answer_type": "exact",
"rubric": null,
"verified_source": "Nepal-China Joint Survey 2020",
"tags": ["geography", "everest", "height"]
}Answer Types
exact— model answer must match reference exactly (or contain exact figure)contains— model answer must contain key information from referencerubric— model answer evaluated against rubric criteria
Design Principles
- All FACT answers verified against official sources (Nepal Government, UN records, Constitution of Nepal 2072)
- Regional diversity: Madhesh/Terai culture explicitly represented (Chhath, Tharu Maghi, Maithili language)
- Nepali unit systems used in MATH (mana/pathi, ropani/aana, bigha/kattha)
- Difficulty genuinely distributed: 41% easy, 40% medium, 19% hard
Origin
Created as part of an independent audit of himalaya-ai's Nepali AI model ecosystem (June 2026). Two PRs were filed against himalayagpt-0.5b and himalayagpt-0.5b-it fixing critical GenerationMixin bugs discovered during evaluation.
Author
Premanand Pathak (premmm) — AI Engineer, Kathmandu, Nepal
Citation
@dataset{pathak2026nepalibench,
author = {Premanand Pathak},
title = {NepaliBench: A Benchmark for Nepali Language Model Evaluation},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/premmm/nepali-bench}
}