Do Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese?
Farhansyah, Mohammad Rifqi Darmawan, Iwan Kusumawardhana, Adryan Winata, Genta Indra Aji, Alham Fikri TantiWijaya, Derry
Farhansyah, Mohammad Rifqi
Darmawan, Iwan
Kusumawardhana, Adryan
Winata, Genta Indra
Aji, Alham Fikri
TantiWijaya, Derry
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Department
Natural Language Processing
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Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
The Javanese language features a complex system of honorifics that vary according to the social status of the speaker, listener, and referent. Despite its cultural and linguistic significance, there has been limited progress in developing a comprehensive corpus to capture these variations for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present UNGGAH-UNGGUH(1), a carefully curated dataset designed to encapsulate the nuances of Unggah-Ungguh Basa, the Javanese speech etiquette framework that dictates the choice of words and phrases based on social hierarchy and context. Using UNGGAH-UNGGUH, we assess the ability of language models (LMs) to process various levels of Javanese honorifics through classification and machine translation tasks. To further evaluate cross-lingual LMs, we conduct machine translation experiments between Javanese (at specific honorific levels) and Indonesian. Additionally, we explore whether LMs can generate contextually appropriate Javanese honorifics in conversation tasks, where the honorific usage should align with the social role and contextual cues. Our findings indicate that current LMs struggle with most honorific levels, exhibiting a bias toward certain honorific tiers.
Citation
M. R. Farhansyah, I. Darmawan, A. Kusumawardhana, G. I. Winata, A. F. Aji, and D. T. Wijaya, “Do Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese?,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 1, pp. 26732–26754, 2025, doi: 10.18653/V1/2025.ACL-LONG.1296
Source
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 63RD ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, VOL 1: LONG PAPERS
Conference
63rd Association for Computational Linguistics Meeting-ACL-Annual
Keywords
Multilingual Semantic Parsing, Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning, Graph-Enhanced Representations, Cross-Lingual Transfer, Entity Linking, Structured Output Generation, Low-Resource Languages, Large Language Models
Subjects
Source
63rd Association for Computational Linguistics Meeting-ACL-Annual
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics