arXiv Computation and Language

CrisiLangs: A Multilingual Resource for Crisis Warning Generation

CrisiLangs is a multilingual extension of the CrisiText dataset, adding Italian, Bulgarian, German, and Greek translations of warning messages for 1,000 crisis events, resulting in 5,000 event‑message pairs across five languages. The resource was used to fine‑tune a multilingual model, which outperformed a zero‑shot baseline on ROUGE‑L, BLEU, and BERTScore in every language and configuration. Human preference studies showed that low decoding temperatures were favored across all languages, while the impact of emergency guidelines varied by language.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

Is MT Ready for the Next Crisis or Pandemic?

The article investigates whether commercial machine translation (MT) tools—Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, GPT, Gemini, and Claude—are ready to support communication during crises or pandemics. Using the TICO-19 dataset, which contains pandemic-related sentences in high-priority low-resource languages, the study evaluates the usability of translations produced by these systems. The goal is to determine how effectively these MT tools can bridge language gaps between governments, aid providers, medical professionals, and affected communities.

By Vipasha Bansal, William D. Lewis, Nicole Mihaylova, Elizabeth Brown, Benjamin Pong
arXiv AI
2d ago

How I Aligned Your Model: Scaling Up Multilingual Safety Training with Templates

The paper introduces MSafeTemp, a large multilingual safety alignment corpus covering 60 languages, created via a template-based augmentation pipeline that extracts safe templates from harmful prompts, translates them, and fills slots with culturally authentic entities. The authors demonstrate that evaluating safety solely in English can misjudge multilingual performance, as attacks that fail in English may succeed when translated, and culturally localized variants reveal additional failures. They also show that augmenting safety training data with these templates improves safety performance beyond English.

By Max Neuwinger, Hanna Yukhymenko, Imanol Schlag
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Multilingual Safety Signals Are Multi-Layered: Filtering Safety-Degrading Data for Safer LLMs

The paper introduces MMSAFE, a multi-layer framework designed to identify safety-degrading data in multilingual large language models. It shows that safety signals are distributed across multiple layers and only partially shared across languages, unlike the single-layer assumption used in monolingual settings. Experiments demonstrate that MMSAFE reduces harmful-response rates by 60% compared to random filtering and outperforms the best single-layer baseline across various models, languages, and safety benchmarks.

By Jiakun Li, Guowei Song, Sijia Li, Xingwei He, Hongzheng Chai, Yuan Yuan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Complex-Text Robustness Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Low-Resource Multilingual Text-to-Speech

The paper introduces a framework to evaluate and diagnose the robustness of low‑resource multilingual text‑to‑speech systems when faced with complex text inputs such as numbers, dates, named entities, long sentences, code‑switched expressions, and punctuation structures. It assesses robustness across content consistency, language consistency, and generation stability, and proposes automatic metrics (character error rate, language ID accuracy, duration abnormal rate) along with a lightweight Text Risk Score (TRS) that predicts synthesis risk from interpretable text features. Experiments on Thai, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Indonesian TTS systems reveal distinct failure patterns and show that TRS correlates positively with content and duration errors, offering a low‑cost pre‑synthesis risk indicator.

By Tianlun Zuo, Ziyu Zhang, Tingzhi Mao, Zhonghua Fu, Lei Xie
arXiv AI
Oct 21

Global Security Blind Spots: Translation as a Safety Bypass in Low-Resource Languages

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can be bypassed by translating harmful requests from English into low‑resource languages. By testing ten popular LLMs across 79 languages, the authors find that safe English completions often fail to remain safe after translation, with bypass rates between 21.9% and 44.4%. The risk is unevenly distributed across language families and varies significantly between models, making it hard to rank models by safety consistently.

By Jalil Alva, David Harper, Abigail E. Thornton, Rafael S. Villalobos Alva, Leonardo Kenji Minemura Suazo, Konstantinos Karageorgos, Diego Velazquez, Sergio A. Serrano, Marvin Vargas Flores, Aaron Schliem, Fernando F. Migone
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

IndicSafeEval is a new evaluation framework that tests the safety robustness of large language models against persuasion-based jailbreak attacks in Indian languages. The benchmark covers ten safety-critical content categories, six persuasive strategies, and four languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi—producing 7,200 adversarial prompts. Experiments show that model safety varies significantly across languages, prompt styles, and risk categories, highlighting gaps in current English-centric safety assessments.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 26

AfriGuard: Safety and Robust Refusal For African Languages

arXiv:2610.26474v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) designed to interact with users are typically trained to respond appropriately to harmful or toxic content. However, e...

By Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Iffat Maab, Alexander D. Cai, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Jonas Kgomo, Folasade Alabi, Salomey Osei, Saminu Muhammad Aliyu, Nkechinyere Faith Aguobi, Bontu Fufa Balcha, Blessing Sibanda, Davis David, Mouhamadane Mboup, Daud Abolade, Neo Putini, Louis Powell, Kiant'e Brantley, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, Julia Kreutzer