Safety of Large Language Models Beyond English: A Systematic Literature Review of Risks, Biases, and Safeguards
Aleksandra Krasnodębska, Katarzyna Dziewulska, Karolina Seweryn, Maciej Chrabaszcz, Wojciech Kusa
Abstract
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, ensuring their safety across multiple languages has become a critical concern. While LLMs demonstrate impressive capabilities in English, their safety mechanisms may not generalize effectively to other languages, leading to disparities in toxicity detection, bias mitigation, and harm prevention. This systematic review examines the multilingual safety of LLMs by synthesizing findings from recent studies that evaluate their robustness across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts beyond English language. Our review explores the methodologies used to assess multilingual safety, identifies challenges such as dataset availability and evaluation biases. Based on our analysis we highlight gaps in multilingual safety research and provide recommendations for future work. This review aims to contribute to the development of fair and effective safety mechanisms for LLMs across all languages. We provide the extracted data in an interactive Streamlit dashboard, enabling transparent access to the raw data and allowing for continuous updates.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.eacl-long.44
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Rabat, Morocco
- Editors:
- Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1003–1034
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.44/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Aleksandra Krasnodębska, Katarzyna Dziewulska, Karolina Seweryn, Maciej Chrabaszcz, and Wojciech Kusa. 2026. Safety of Large Language Models Beyond English: A Systematic Literature Review of Risks, Biases, and Safeguards. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1003–1034, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Safety of Large Language Models Beyond English: A Systematic Literature Review of Risks, Biases, and Safeguards (Krasnodębska et al., EACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.44.pdf