BIASEDTALES-ML: A Multilingual Dataset for Analyzing Narrative Attribute Distributions in LLM-Generated Stories

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7705 Authors

Keywords: Multilingual Datasets; Narrative Bias; Story Generation; Cross-Lingual Analysis; Large Language Model

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate narrative content, including children’s stories, which play an important role in social and cultural learning. Despite growing interest in AI safety and alignment, most existing evaluations focus primarily on English, leaving the cross-lingual generalization of aligned behavior underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textsc{BiasedTales-ML}, a large-scale parallel corpus of approximately 350,000 children’s stories generated across eight typologically and culturally diverse languages using a full-permutation prompting design. We propose a structured generator-extractor pipeline and a multi-dimensional distributional analysis framework to examine how narrative attributes vary across languages, models, and social conditions.Our analysis reveals substantial cross-lingual variability in narrative generation patterns, indicating that distributions observed in English do not always exhibit similar characteristics in other languages, particularly in lower-resource settings. At the narrative level, we identify recurring structural patterns involving character roles, settings, and thematic emphasis, which manifest differently across linguistic contexts.These findings highlight the limitations of English-centric evaluation for characterizing socially grounded narrative generation in multilingual settings. We release the dataset, code, and an interactive visualization tool to support future research on multilingual narrative analysis and evaluation.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Computational Social Science, Cultural Analytics, and NLP for Social Good

Research Area Keywords: language/cultural bias analysis, NLP tools for social analysis

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Approaches to low-resource settings, Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Swahili

Submission Number: 7705