LKValues

LKValues is a survey-grounded Sinhala–English resource suite for studying the alignment of large language models with Sri Lankan societal values.

It contains two complementary resources:

• LKvaluesIT — an instruction-tuning dataset for training models to generate value-grounded explanations.
• LKvaluesBench — an evaluation benchmark for testing controlled value-sensitive judgment.

LKValues is based on 40 societal values retained through a trilingual Sinhala–Tamil–English survey of 205 Sri Lankan respondents.

These values should not be interpreted as an official, exhaustive, or universally applicable definition of Sri Lankan values.

LKvaluesIT — Instruction-Tuning Dataset

LKvaluesIT is the training resource of LKValues.

It is designed for value-grounded generation and supervised instruction tuning.

Given a situation and a target Sri Lankan societal value, the model is expected to generate a short explanation describing how the situation supports that value.

The public release contains the full bilingual instruction datasets:

Language	Instances
English	~150,000
Sinhala	~150,000
Total	~300,000

Each instance contains:

{
  "instruction": "A situation or scenario grounded in a Sri Lankan context",
  "input": "Target Sri Lankan societal value",
  "output": "A short value-grounded explanation"
}

LKvaluesBench — Benchmark Dataset

LKvaluesBench is the evaluation resource of LKValues.

It is designed to evaluate controlled value-sensitive judgment.

Each benchmark item contains:

{
  "ID": 2001,
  "question": "Question or value-sensitive scenario",
  "Statement_A": "First candidate statement",
  "Statement_B": "Second candidate statement",
  "CorrectChoice": "A",
  "primary_value": "Health",
  "Source": "SinhalaMMLU"
}

LKvaluesBench contains 1,000 aligned benchmark instances in English and Sinhala.

Models should return one of the following labels:

Label	Meaning
A	Only Statement A is justifiable
B	Only Statement B is justifiable
BOTH	Both statements are justifiable
0	Neither statement is justifiable

Dataset Files

LKvaluesIT/
├── train_en.json
└── train_si.json

LKvaluesBench/
├── test_en.json
└── test_si.json

Languages

• English
• Sinhala

Citation

If you use LKValues, LKvaluesIT, or LKvaluesBench in your research, please cite our AACL-IJCNLP 2026 paper:

@inproceedings{muthugala-etal-2026-lkvalues,
    title = "{LKV}alues: Aligning Large Language Models with {S}ri {L}ankan Societal Values",
    author = "Muthugala, Nethmi  and
      Supryadi  and
      Ranathunga, Surangika  and
      de Silva, Nisansa  and
      Tao, Ruijie  and
      Gunatunga, Ovindu  and
      Zhu, Pengyun  and
      Zhang, Shaowei  and
      Zheng, Jingting  and
      Xiong, Deyi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the {A}sia-Pacific Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Hengqin, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.118/",
    pages = "2559--2597",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-439-2"
}

Official Publication: ACL Anthology (AACL-IJCNLP 2026)

Preprint: arXiv:2607.20410

Contact

Nethmi Muthugala
neth.muthugala1@gmail.com

Deyi Xiong
dyxiong@tju.edu.cn