The Multilingual Euphemism Benchmark: Datasets and Baselines for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Abstract

Euphemisms are words or phrases used to soften or indirectly refer to taboo or sensitive topics. They pose interpretation challenges because the same expression may appear in different senses depending on context: literal, figurative but non-euphemistic, or euphemistic. For example, pull the plug may refer euphemistically to ending a patient’s life support, figuratively to canceling a project or funding, or literally to unplugging a device. Euphemisms also vary across languages and cultures in both their surface forms and the contexts in which they are conventionally used. Previous work introduced datasets for the computational study of euphemisms in five languages. We extend this line of work by introducing two new annotated datasets for euphemism detection in Polish and Ukrainian and by standardizing resources for all seven languages into a unified benchmark format that supports cross-lingual evaluation. Finally, we provide zero-shot and few-shot baselines using GPT-5-nano. We ran each configuration five times and report the average score, establishing reference scores for multilingual pragmatic understanding. We also performed pilot tests using Qwen3-4B on the English and Chinese datasets.

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