SomaliBench Eval: Measuring English-to-Somali Refusal Gaps in Open-Weight Language Models
Large language model safety evaluation remains heavily English-centered, leaving low-resource languages under-measured even when models are deployed globally. We evaluate four open-weight instruction-tuned models on SomaliBench v0, a native-author-verified benchmark of 100 harmful-intent prompts paired across English and Somali. Each of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Gemma-2-9B-Instruct, Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct, and Aya-23-8B is run locally with temperature 0 and the same English "helpful, harmless, and honest" (HHH) system prompt. We find large English-to-Somali refusal gaps for all four models, ranging from 0.40 to 0.93, all strictly positive under a paired bootstrap and significant by exact McNem...
| Authors | Khalid Yusuf Dahir |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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