GhazalBench: Canonical Verse Access in LLMs across Persian Ghazals and Shakespearean Sonnets

[2603.09979] GhazalBench: Canonical Verse Access in LLMs across Persian Ghazals and Shakespearean Sonnets Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.09979 (cs) [Submitted on 6 Feb 2026 ( v1 ), last revised 24 Aug 2026 (this version, v3)] Title: GhazalBench: Canonical Verse Access in LLMs across Persian Ghazals and Shakespearean Sonnets Authors: Ghazal Kalhor , Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh View PDF Abstract: Persian poetry plays an active role in Iranian cultural practice, where verses by canonical poets such as Hafez and Saadi are frequently quoted, paraphrased, or completed from incomplete cues. Supporting such interactions requires language models to reliably access canonical verses from semantic and lexical information. We introduce GhazalBench, a benchmark for evaluating how large language models (LLMs) access the canonical surface forms of Persian ghazal under usage-grounded conditions. Unlike prior work that primarily treats memorization as a liability, GhazalBench studies settings in which access to exact wording is functionally important. The benchmark evaluates completion and recognition under varied semantic and lexical cues. Across proprietary and open-weight multilingual LLMs, exact completion remains challenging, while recognition is substantially stronger. Performance also varies across poets and model families. Parallel experiments on Shakespearean sonnets yield markedly higher completion for several models, consistent with differences in exposure to canonical texts. {Additional experiments suggest that post-training may reduce direct continuation-based access to canonical text.} Our findings motivate evaluation frameworks that distinguish production from recognition and assess access to culturally significant canonical texts. GhazalBench is available at this https URL . Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2603.09979 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2603.09979v3 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09979 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Ghazal Kalhor [ view email ] [v1] Fri, 6 Feb 2026 13:37:27 UTC (8,004 KB) [v2] Mon, 8 Jun 2026 18:03:45 UTC (8,162 KB) [v3] Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:12:19 UTC (10,333 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF view license Current browse context: cs.CL < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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