Padārtha: Ontology-Grounded Fine-Grained NER Benchmark for Classical Sanskrit

Abstract

Annotation schemas are not neutral. When applied to classical literature, tag sets developed for modern journalistic texts impose source-culture definitions on texts they were never designed to describe. We instead ground a schema in the tradition of the text itself introducing \textit{Padārtha}, the first ontology-grounded fine-grained Named Entity Recognition (NER) benchmark for Sanskrit, built on the \textit{Mahābhārata} epic. Our tag set derives from \textit{Nyāya-Vaiśesika}, a classical Indian ontological system, yielding 18 fine-grained categories organized under 10 ontological nodes and mapped onto five standard coarse tags, ensuring interoperability with existing benchmarks. Expert annotators label over 12.6K entries from a scholarly index of named entities, linked to corresponding mentions in the \textit{Mahānāma} corpus, producing fine-grained annotations for 108,335 entity mentions across 73,632 verses, along with a 5,000-verse expert-verified test set sampled to stress rare mentions. We present the first systematic benchmarking of generative NER against traditional architectures for Sanskrit, finding that fine-tuned generative models perform comparably to task-specific systems. However, all systems show a sharp decline from coarse to fine granularity and struggle with out-of-entity mentions unseen during training. The limitation is not due to data scarcity alone, as fine-tuned models recall unseen entities far worse than seen ones and tend to default to the majority sense under lexical ambiguity.