United States

Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain—a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs&#39; ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.

NAACL 2025

Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge

cultural knowledge probing

cultural bias analysis

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain—a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs' ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.

Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish

We present `KODIS`, a dyadic dispute resolution corpus containing thousands of dialogues from over 75 countries. Motivated by a theoretical model of culture and conflict, participants engage in a typical customer service dispute designed by experts to evoke strong emotions and conflict. The corpus contains a rich set of dispositional, process, and outcome measures. The initial analysis supports theories of how anger expressions lead to escalatory spirals and highlights cultural differences in emotional expression. We make this corpus and data collection framework available to the community.

KODIS: A Multicultural Dispute Resolution Dialogue Corpus

Challenges in managing linguistic diversity and integrating various musical modalities are faced by current music information retrieval systems. These limitations reduce their effectiveness in a global, multimodal music environment. To address these issues, we introduce CLaMP 2, a system compatible with 101 languages that supports both ABC notation (a text-based musical notation format) and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) for music information retrieval. CLaMP 2, pre-trained on 1.5 million ABC-MIDI-text triplets, includes a multilingual text encoder and a multimodal music encoder aligned via contrastive learning. By leveraging large language models, we obtain refined and consistent multilingual descriptions at scale, significantly reducing textual noise and balancing language distribution. Our experiments show that CLaMP 2 achieves state-of-the-art results in both multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities, thus establishing a new standard for inclusive and global music information retrieval.

CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models

While natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been applied to user reviews in recommendation systems, the potential of leveraging Arabic dialects in this context remains unexplored. Arabic is spoken by over 420 million people, with significant dialectal variation across regions. These dialects, often classified as low-resource languages, present both challenges and opportunities for machine learning applications. This paper represents the first attempt to incorporate Arabic dialects as a signal in recommendation systems. We explore both explicit and implicit approaches for integrating Arabic dialect information from user reviews, demonstrating its impact on improving recommendation performance. Our findings highlight the potential for leveraging dialectal diversity in Arabic to enhance recommendation systems and encourage further research at the intersection of NLP and recommendation systems within the Arab multicultural world.

On Using Arabic Language Dialects in Recommendation Systems

Hate speech relies heavily on cultural influences, leading to varying individual interpretations. For that reason, we propose a Semantic Componential Analysis (SCA) framework for a cross-cultural and cross-domain analysis of hate speech definitions. We create the first dataset of hate speech definitions encompassing 493 definitions from more than 100 cultures, drawn from five key domains: online dictionaries, academic research, Wikipedia, legal texts, and online platforms. By decomposing these definitions into semantic components, our analysis reveals significant variation across definitions, yet many domains borrow definitions from one another without taking into account the target culture. We conduct zero-shot model experiments using our proposed dataset, employing three popular open-sourced LLMs to understand the impact of different definitions on hate speech detection. Our findings indicate that LLMs are sensitive to definitions: responses for hate speech detection change according to the complexity of definitions used in the prompt.

Untangling Hate Speech Definitions: A Semantic Componential Analysis Across Cultures and Domains

As large language models (LLMs) expand into performing as agents for real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks, evaluating their robustness becomes increasingly important. However, existing benchmarks often overlook critical dimensions like cultural and social awareness. To address these, we introduce CASA, a benchmark designed to assess LLM agents’ sensitivity to cultural and social norms across two web-based tasks: online shopping and social discussion forums. Our approach evaluates LLM agents' ability to detect and appropriately respond to norm-violating user queries and observations. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that measures awareness coverage, helpfulness in managing user queries, and the violation rate when facing misleading web content. Experiments show that current LLMs perform significantly better in non-agent than in web-based agent environments, with agents achieving less than 10% awareness coverage and over 40% violation rates. To improve performance, we explore two methods: prompting and fine-tuning, and find that combining both methods can offer complementary advantages -- fine-tuning on culture-specific datasets significantly enhances the agents' ability to generalize across different regions, while prompting boosts the agents’ ability to navigate complex tasks. These findings highlight the importance of constantly benchmarking LLM agents' cultural and social awareness during the development cycle.

Evaluating Cultural and Social Awareness of LLM Web Agents

The advent of Music-Language Models has greatly enhanced the automatic music generation capability of AI systems, but they are also limited in their coverage of the musical genres and cultures of the world. We present a study of the datasets and research papers for music generation and quantify the bias and under-representation of genres. We find that only 5.7% of the total hours of existing music datasets come from non-Western genres, which naturally leads to disparate performance of the models across genres. We then investigate the efficacy of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques in mitigating this bias. Our experiments with two popular models -- MusicGen and Mustango, for two underrepresented non-Western music traditions -- Hindustani Classical and Turkish Makam music, highlight the promises as well as the non-triviality of cross-genre adaptation of music through small datasets, implying the need for more equitable baseline music-language models that are designed for cross-cultural transfer learning.

Music for All: Representational Bias and Cross-Cultural Adaptability of Music Generation Models

While a large body of work inspects language models for biases concerning gender, race, occupation and religion, biases of geographical nature are relatively less explored. Some recent studies benchmark the degree to which large language models encode geospatial knowledge. However, the impact of the encoded geographical knowledge (or lack thereof) on real-world applications has not been documented. In this work, we examine large language models for two common scenarios that require geographical knowledge: (a) travel recommendations and (b) geo-anchored story generation. Specifically, we study five popular language models, and across about 100K travel requests, and 200K story generations, we observe that travel recommendations corresponding to poorer countries are less unique with fewer location references, and stories from these regions more often convey emotions of hardship and sadness compared to those from wealthier nations.

Richer Output for Richer Countries: Uncovering Geographical Disparities in Generated Stories and Travel Recommendations

**This paper discusses and contains offensive content.** Language models (LMs) are used in decision-making systems and as interactive assistants. However, how well do these models making judgements align with the diversity of human values, particularly regarding social and moral norms? In this work, we investigate how inclusively LMs perceive norms across demographic groups (e.g., gender, age, and income). We prompt 11 LMs on rules-of-thumb (RoTs) and compare their outputs with the existing responses of 100 human annotators. We introduce the Absolute Distance Alignment Metric (ADA-Met) to quantify alignment on ordinal questions. We find notable disparities in LM responses, with younger, higher-income groups showing closer alignment, raising concerns about the representation of marginalized perspectives. Our findings highlight the importance of further efforts to make LMs more inclusive of diverse human values. The code and prompts are available on GitHub under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

How Inclusively do LMs Perceive Social and Moral Norms?

This paper focuses on modeling gender-based and pair-or-group disparities in online supportive interactions among adolescents. To address the limitations of conventional social science methods in handling large datasets, this research employs language models to detect supportive interactions based on the Social Support Behavioral Code and to model their distribution. The study conceptualizes detection as a classification task, constructs a new dataset, and trains predictive models. The novel dataset comprises 196,772 utterances from 2165 users collected from Instant Messenger apps. The results show that the predictions of language models can be used to effectively model the distribution of supportive interactions in private online dialogues. As a result, this study provides new computational evidence that supports the theory that supportive interactions are more prevalent in online female-to-female conversations. The findings advance our understanding of supportive interactions in adolescent communication and present methods to automate the analysis of large datasets, opening new research avenues in computational social science.

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Examining Spanish Counseling with MIDAS: a Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish

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Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge