HaYo: Repurposing DiaSafety Dataset for Dialogue Safety Evaluation in Hausa and Yoruba

Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Bolade Deborah Ashaolu, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Daud Olamide Abolade, Amina Imam Abubakar, Oluwatosin Ayomide Akinrinde, Murja Sani Gadanya, Omodolapo Dorcas Ashaolu, Abubakar Khalid Auwal, Adewumi Awujoola, Shamsuddeen Umaru Adamu, Israel Olawole Ashaolu, Mihael Arcan, Paul Buitelaar


Abstract
Research efforts aimed at detecting unsafe dialogues have resulted in creation of benchmark datasets and models for evaluation. The benchmarks mostly exist in English and other high resourced languages. In order to address the challenge of unavailability of dialogue safety evaluation dataset in Hausa and Yorùbá, we repurporse DiaSafety dataset to develop HaYo dataset, by providing contextualised human annotation of dialogues in DiaSafety. We provide dialogues in Hausa and Yorùbá, obtained by human translation of dialogues in the DiaSafety dataset, to raters who are native speakers. The dialogues are annotated as Unsafe or Safe. We evaluate seven models with moderation, conversational or multilingual capabilities in terms of F1 Score. Using McNemar test, we observe that the predictions of GPT-4.1 and Gemma-3-12b-it on HaYo are statistically significant at p < 0.05. In our evaluation with instructions in English, we observe lower F1 scores in six out of the seven models, comparing the performance on DiaSafety and HaYo labels. The model predictions were inconsistent with the labels in the HaYo dataset when instructions and dialogues were provided in Hausa and Yorùbá. Compared to providing instructions in English, the issues range from responses in unspecified languages to underperformance in terms of F1 score. We plan to release the HaYo dataset to the public to promote dialogue safety research, especially in under-resourced languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.rail-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Muzi Matfunjwa, Mmasibidi Setaka, Rooweither Mabuya, Menno van Zaanen
Venues:
RAIL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
84–95
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-rail-09
DOI:
10.63317/2dot9b59z24c
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Bolade Deborah Ashaolu, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Daud Olamide Abolade, Amina Imam Abubakar, Oluwatosin Ayomide Akinrinde, Murja Sani Gadanya, Omodolapo Dorcas Ashaolu, Abubakar Khalid Auwal, Adewumi Awujoola, Shamsuddeen Umaru Adamu, Israel Olawole Ashaolu, Mihael Arcan, and Paul Buitelaar. 2026. HaYo: Repurposing DiaSafety Dataset for Dialogue Safety Evaluation in Hausa and Yoruba. In Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026, pages 84–95, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
HaYo: Repurposing DiaSafety Dataset for Dialogue Safety Evaluation in Hausa and Yoruba (Ajayi et al., RAIL 2026)
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