aisingapore/SEASafeguardBench

SEA-SafeguardBench: Culturally Grounded Safety Benchmark for Southeast Asian Languages

Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.194/

@inproceedings{tasawong-etal-2026-sea-safeguardbench,
    title = "{SEA}-{S}afeguard{B}ench: Culturally Grounded Safety Benchmark for {S}outheast {A}sian Languages",
    author = "Tasawong, Panuthep  and
      Ngui, Jian Gang  and
      Aji, Alham Fikri  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      Limkonchotiwat, Peerat",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.194/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.194",
    pages = "3973--4003",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Safeguard models help large language models (LLMs) detect and block harmful content, but most evaluations remain English-centric and overlook linguistic and cultural diversity. Existing multilingual safety benchmarks often rely on machine-translated English data, which fails to capture nuances in low-resource languages. Southeast Asian (SEA) languages are underrepresented despite the region{'}s linguistic diversity and unique safety concerns, from culturally sensitive political speech to region-specific misinformation. Addressing these gaps requires benchmarks that are natively authored to reflect local norms and harm scenarios. We introduce SEA-SafeguardBench, the first human-verified safety benchmark for SEA, covering eight languages, 21,640 samples, across three subsets: general, in-the-wild, and content generation. The experimental results from our benchmark demonstrate that even state-of-the-art LLMs and guardrails are challenged by SEA cultural and harm scenarios and underperform when compared to English texts."
}