Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing

Nadir Durrani, Basel Mousi, Fahim Dalvi


Abstract
While Knowledge Editing has been extensively studied in monolingual settings, it remains underexplored in multilingual contexts. This survey systematizes recent research on Multilingual Knowledge Editing (MKE), a growing subdomain of model editing focused on ensuring factual edits generalize reliably across languages. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of MKE methods, covering parameter-based, memory-based, fine-tuning, and hypernetwork approaches. We survey available benchmarks, summarize key findings on method effectiveness and transfer patterns, and identify persistent challenges such as cross-lingual propagation, language anisotropy, and limited evaluation for low-resource and culturally specific languages. We also discuss broader concerns such as stability and scalability of multilingual edits. Our analysis consolidates a rapidly evolving area and lays the groundwork for future progress in editable language-aware LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.803
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15917–15929
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.803/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Nadir Durrani, Basel Mousi, and Fahim Dalvi. 2025. Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15917–15929, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing (Durrani et al., EMNLP 2025)
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