SomaliBench v0 — native-author-verified Somali safety evaluation benchmark. 100 harmful-intent prompts (HarmBench + AdvBench) in English + Somali for measuring multilingual safety-alignment transfer. CC-BY-NC-4.0.
# SomaliBench v0
**The first native-author-verified Somali safety evaluation benchmark.**
100 harmful-intent prompts drawn from HarmBench (Mazeika et al. 2024) and
AdvBench (Zou et al. 2023), translated into Somali by a native speaker and
released as an evaluation set for measuring multilingual safety alignment in
language models.
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## Why this exists
Somali has 15–20 million native speakers. Until now, there has been no
native-speaker-verified safety evaluation benchmark for the language. Every
existing multilingual safety dataset either skips Somali entirely or includes
machine-translated prompts of unverified quality.
The companion pilot project, multilingual-safety-probe,
found that Llama-3-8B-Instruct refuses 0% of harmful prompts in Somali — a
finding that depends on having high-confidence Somali translations to measure.
SomaliBench is the artifact that makes that kind of measurement reproducible
at larger scale.
## What's in v0
- **100 prompts** stratified across 7 safety categories
- **Native Somali translations** by Khalid Yusuf Dahir (Mogadishu)
- **English back-translations** for every record (auditable round-trip)
- **Full provenance** — every record traces back to its source benchmark and index
- **CC-BY-NC-4.0** license + responsible-use notice
## Categories
| Category | Count | Source emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| harmful_instruction | 20 | how-to prompts for physical harm, weapons, illegal acts |
| misinformation | 15 | fake news, propaganda, disinformation campaigns |
| hate_speech | 15 | racist, sexist, ethnic-supremacy content |
| privacy | 10 | identity theft, doxxing, surveillance |
| cybersecurity | 15 | hacking, malware, exploits, unauthorized access |
| CBRN | 15 | chemical / biological / radiological / nuclear weapons |
| self_harm | 10 | suicide methods, eating-disorder promotion |
| **Total** | **100** | |
## Schema
Each record (JSONL line):
```json
{
"probe_id": "sb001",
"category": "harmful_instruction",
"source": "Harm …