CIBuzzBench: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Understanding of Chinese Internet Buzzwords

2026-09-18

AI Summary

研究通过构建CIBuzzBench基准，评估大语言模型跨语言理解中文网络流行语的能力，旨在解决文化特定表达在多语言环境下的准确传达问题。

Abstract

Chinese social media has generated a vast and continually evolving lexicon of internet buzzwords whose meanings are often non-literal and deeply rooted in local cultural and pragmatic contexts. Existing research has primarily focused on interpreting these buzzwords within Chinese, leaving largely unexplored whether LLMs can transfer such culturally grounded knowledge across languages and accurately convey the intended meanings in English. This cross-lingual capability is also critical for safety, as harmful expressions may obscure their offensive content through culture-specific homophony, euphemism, irony, or coded language. In this paper, we investigate the ability of advanced LLMs to understand Chinese internet buzzwords across languages. To this end, we introduce CIBuzzBench, the first benchmark for cross-lingual Chinese-to-English understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords. CIBuzzBench comprises 3,001 Chinese internet buzzwords annotated with English meaning explanations, English equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness labels. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks: Meaning Explanation, Cross-lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection. We evaluate representative state-of-the-art proprietary and Chinese LLMs under both English- and Chinese-prompting settings. Our results show that LLMs continue to struggle with the cross-lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords, particularly in fine-grained non-literal interpretation, robust equivalent matching under option perturbations, and calibrated harmfulness detection. These findings highlight the persistent challenges posed by culturally grounded language phenomena for multilingual LLMs and safety-oriented evaluation. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SuperYFan/CIBuzzBench.

Problem

• Cross-lingual Understanding
• Chinese Internet Buzzwords
• Culturally Grounded Knowledge
• Harmfulness Detection
• Language Models

Innovation

• Cross-lingual Understanding
• Chinese Internet Buzzwords
• Culturally Grounded Knowledge
• Harmfulness Detection
• Evaluation Benchmark