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:

@misc{muthugala2026lkvaluesaligninglargelanguage,
      title={LKValues: Aligning Large Language Models with Sri Lankan Societal Values}, 
      author={Nethmi Muthugala and Supryadi and Surangika Ranathunga and Nisansa de Silva and Ruijie Tao and Ovindu Gunatunga and Pengyun Zhu and Shaowei Zhang and Jingting Zheng and Deyi Xiong},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2607.20410},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20410}, 
}

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20410

Contact

Nethmi Muthugala
neth.muthugala1@gmail.com

Deyi Xiong
dyxiong@tju.edu.cn