Of Words and Meaning: A Grammatical and Semantic Benchmark for Faroese LLM Understanding

Abstract

Evaluating language technology for low-resource languages faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of native benchmarks suitable for systematic assessment. For Faroese, no such evaluation frameworks exist. We address this gap by presenting the first benchmark suite for Faroese semantic understanding and grammatical competence. Our methodology transforms existing lexicographic resources, authoritative dictionaries and error corpora, into systematic evaluation tasks through computational restructuring, demonstrating a replicable approach for resource-constrained settings. The resulting benchmarks assess grammatical correctness, semantic relation classification, and metaphor comprehension. Evaluation across LLMs from compact open-source to large-scale commercial systems reveals consistent performance patterns favouring proprietary models. This work establishes a proof of concept for benchmark creation from traditional linguistic resources, and provides a methodological template for other low-resource language communities.

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