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Beyond Literal Meaning: How LLMs Interpret Yemeni Proverbs

We present a benchmark Yemeni proverbs dataset paired with expert-annotated explanations, designed to evaluate the cultural reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, we assess seven LLMs through both automatic and human evaluation. Results show that instruction-tuned models like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro outperform smaller models in both automatic and human evaluations. Few-shot prompting significantly improves performance across all models, underscoring its value for figurative and culturally grounded language tasks. Notably, ALLaM, a bilingual model trained on Arabic and English, achieves competitive results, demonstrating the potential of regionally adapted models for low-resource cultural tasks. LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation correlates strongly with human assessment (Kendall’s τ up to 0.98). Error analysis identifies recurring literal interpretation and cultural misalignment as key failure modes.