| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| language: |
| - ta |
| - en |
| pretty_name: TamilBench |
| size_categories: |
| - n<1K |
| task_categories: |
| - question-answering |
| tags: |
| - tamil |
| - tanglish |
| - code-mixed |
| - romanized |
| - beam |
| - build-with-beam |
| - token-efficiency |
| configs: |
| - config_name: parallel |
| data_files: data/parallel.jsonl |
| - config_name: native |
| data_files: data/native.jsonl |
| - config_name: beam_runs |
| data_files: results/beam_runs.jsonl |
| --- |
| # TamilBench v1 |
|
|
| **How well does Beam reason in Tamil, and what does it cost?** |
|
|
| - `parallel` (50 items): the same question in **English**, **Tamil script** and colloquial **Tanglish** (romanized Tamil). Categories: math word problems with Indian context (20), logic (8), Tamil culture/knowledge (15), everyday (7). Short gold answers plus aliases. |
| - `native` (22 items): questions that only exist in Tamil: Tamil number words, ancient Tamil numerals (௲ ௱ ௰), letter counting by Tamil grammar (எழுத்து), Sangam/Thirukkural literature, grammar, the Tamil calendar. |
| - `beam_runs` (516 rows): every response from `reflection/Beam-1.0-501B-A23B` (HF Inference Providers → Baseten) with output, reasoning trace, prompt/reasoning/completion tokens, latency, correctness and cost. |
|
|
| ## Headline results (Beam-1.0-501B-A23B, Oct 2026) |
|
|
| | Language | Accuracy | Prompt tok | Reasoning tok | $ per 1k queries | $ per 1k at `reasoning_effort=minimal` | |
| |---|---|---|---|---|---| |
| | English | 100% | 90 | 106 | 0.178 | 0.150 | |
| | Tamil script | 100% | 231 | 161 | 0.301 | 0.254 | |
| | Tanglish | 100% | 104 | 214 | 0.313 | 0.246 | |
|
|
| - Beam's tokenizer spends **8.0 tokens per Tamil word** (0.92 chars/token) vs 1.5 for English: the same question costs **3.75× more input tokens** in Tamil script. |
| - Tanglish is cheap to read (2.4 tokens/word) but Beam **thinks 2× longer** (4× on logic puzzles): it translates internally first. |
| - Net: Tamil and Tanglish queries cost **~1.7×** English. `reasoning_effort="minimal"` kept 100% accuracy and cut cost 16–21%. |
| - Native Tamil split: **98.5%** (65/66); the one miss was the last word of Kural 1. |
|
|
| Scoring: last number for numeric answers; alias match for words. Prices: Baseten list $0.40/1M input, $1.20/1M output (reasoning billed as output). The parallel set is saturated for Beam, so read accuracy as a sanity floor; the token/cost findings are the contribution. |
|
|
| Interactive explorer + live Beam tokenizer: https://huggingface.co/spaces/esscor/TamilBench |
|
|
| Built by Mohamed Adib for the Hugging Face × Reflection *Build with Beam* challenge. |
|
|
