LoraxBench: A Benchmark for Indonesian Local Languages and Registers

Dataset Summary

LoraxBench is a comprehensive multilingual benchmark focusing on Indonesian and 19 Indonesian local languages, covering 6 diverse NLP tasks. It includes multiple registers for select languages, emphasizing the impact of formal and casual speech on model performance. LoraxBench is professionally translated and validated by natives, and were sourced from Indonesian-originated dataset, Our data is sourced from Indonesian-originated content, thus capturing local nuances better than English-centric data.

LoraxBench fills a critical gap in NLP for Indonesia’s linguistic diversity, where over 700 languages are spoken but few resources exist. Beyond Indonesia, it serves as a valuable resource for modeling challenges common in linguistically rich, resource-scarce regions worldwide.

Languages

The dataset covers the following 20 languages:

Language	ISO Code	Approx. Speakers (millions)	Region
Acehnese	ace	3.7	Aceh
Ambonese Malay	abs	0.2	Ambon
Balinese	ban	4.8	Bali
Banjar	bjn	4.0	South Sulawesi
Batak Toba	bbc	2.5	North Sumatra
Betawi	bew	5.6	Jakarta
Buginese	bug	4.3	South Sulawesi
Gorontalo	gor	1.1	Gorontalo
Iban	iba	0.8	West Kalimantan
Jambi Malay	jax	1.0	Jambi
Javanese	jv	91.0	East/Central Java
Lampung Nyo	abl	1.5	Lampung
Madurese	mad	17.0	East Java
Makasar	mak	1.9	Makasar
Minangkabau	min	8.0	West Sumatra
Musi	mui	3.1	South Sumatra
Ngaju	nij	0.9	Central Kalimantan
Sasak	sas	2.6	West Nusa Tenggara
Sundanese	su	32.0	West Java
Indonesian	id	> 170.0	Indonesia

Registers Included

For three languages, LoraxBench includes two distinct registers capturing different levels of formality:

Language	Formal Register	Casual Register
Javanese	Krama	Ngoko
Sundanese	Lemes	Loma
Madurese	Engghi Ethen	Enja’Iya

Formal registers are used in respectful or formal contexts; casual registers are used among peers and friends, showing significant lexical and stylistic differences.

Tasks and Data Sources

The following are tasks covered in LoraxBench

Reading Comprehension

Answering questions based on Indonesian text passages. This data is translated from the TyDi QA secondary, Indonesian subset.

Open-Domain Question Answering

Answering questions without access to context passages. This data is derived from the TyDi QA secondary, Indonesian subset.

Natural Language Inference (NLI)

Determining entailment, contradiction, or neutrality between sentence pairs. This data is translated from the test-expert subset of IndoNLI, specifically on single-sentence sets.

Causal Reasoning

Reasoning about cause-effect relations in text. This data is translated from locally-nuanced causal reasoning data, COPAL-ID. We have filtered some of the entries that are too Jakartan-specific.

Machine Translation

Translating text to Indonesian. This data is taken from IndoNLI premises, which itself originated from various webpages, news, and articles.

Cultural Question Answering

Answering culturally relevant questions about Indonesia. We source this from IndoCulture, with further filtering and clean-up. Specifically, we change some of the distractors that were deemed obviously wrong, fix some typos and writing inconsistencies, as well as remove some trivially easy questions. More on this in the paper.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The corpora contain no personal or sensitive information. Data was sourced and translated with respect to privacy and ethical guidelines.

Additional Information

• LoraxBench exposes challenges for multilingual models in low-resource and register-variant settings.
• Benchmark results highlight performance gaps between Indonesian, local languages, and registers.

Dataset Curators

Google Research

Licensing Information

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Citation Information

Please cite the following papers when using this dataset:

• The main LoraxBench paper
• Clark et al., 2020. TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages.
• Mahendra et al., 2021. IndoNLI: A Natural Language Inference Dataset for Indonesian.
• Wibowo et al., 2024. COPAL-ID: Causal Reasoning in Indonesian.
• Koto et al., 2024. IndoCulture: Cultural Question Answering in Indonesia.
• Cahyawijaya et al., 2023. NusaCrowd: Indonesian NLP Dataset Collection.