arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Multilingual in Name Only? Cultural and Linguistic Weaknesses of LLMs in Urdu

The paper investigates how multilingual large language models perform when generating stories in Urdu, a low‑resource language. The authors created a corpus of 93 Urdu stories produced by GPT‑5.1, Qwen‑3‑Max, and DeepSeek‑3.1, and manually annotated errors across a nine‑label taxonomy covering linguistic, semantic, and cultural aspects. Findings reveal frequent grammatical and semantic mistakes, lack of coherence, unnatural repetition, and pervasive cultural shallowness, with few‑shot prompting failing to resolve many of these issues.

By Farah Adeeba, Abdul Rafae Khan, Rajesh Bhatt, Hassan Sajjad
arXiv AI
Aug 18

LLM Safety Alignment in Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv:2608. 14626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in safety alignment, yet their safety guarantees remain significantly weaker in low-resource and multilingual settings than in high-resource languages.

By Valdini Douglace Lemofouet, Blessing Ngozi Uzor, Paula Chikaodinaka Anyanwu, Danielle Blanche Kapsa, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, P Sam Sahil, Abigail Oppong, Tassallah Abdullahi, Clemencia Siro, Idris Abdulmumin, Seid Muhie Yimam, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idioms

The paper introduces a new benchmark for Urdu‑to‑English idiomatic translation, featuring 4,000 manually verified sentence pairs in both native Perso‑Arabic script and Romanized Urdu. It evaluates multiple tasks—translation, paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and back‑translation—using various prompting strategies, and finds that state‑of‑the‑art large language models outperform traditional neural machine translation systems, especially in preserving figurative meaning. The study also highlights challenges posed by the lack of standardized orthography in Romanized Urdu, which affects consistency and idiom span detection.

By Muhammad Farmal Khan, Mousumi Akter
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Safety Alignment Illusion: The Cross-Lingual Safety Gap in LLMs

The paper titled "Safety Alignment Illusion: The Cross-Lingual Safety Gap in LLMs" highlights that current safety alignment training for large language models is predominantly English-centric, leading to failures in non‑English languages. It introduces INCLUDE, a multilingual benchmark with 2,604 prompts in six languages (English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Hinglish) to measure Indian‑centric socio‑cultural biases. Evaluation of ten open‑ and closed‑source LLMs shows that Bengali models exhibit the highest bias scores among open‑source models, while English shows the lowest bias in open‑source but the highest in closed‑source models.

By Namya Bhatnagar
arXiv AI
Sep 3

VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages

VakyArth is the first pragmatic benchmark for Indic languages, covering Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. It tests models on five pragmatic phenomena—deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics, and coherence—using multiple-choice questions, natural language inference, and translation tasks authored by native speakers. Evaluation of multilingual LLMs shows consistent failures on pragmatic meanings rooted in Indic linguistic and cultural conventions, with systematic differences across languages and tasks.

By Usneek Singh, Poorvaja Veera Balaji Kumar, Parth Nanda, Anand Madhusoodanan, Geyang Guo, Wei Xu, Junyi Jessy L