Culturally Aware Natural Language Inference

Jing Huang, Diyi Yang


Abstract
Humans produce and consume language in a particular cultural context, which includes knowledge about specific norms and practices. A listener’s awareness of the cultural context is critical for interpreting the speaker’s meaning. A simple expression like *I didn’t leave a tip* implies a strong sense of dissatisfaction when tipping is assumed to be the norm. As NLP systems reach users from different cultures, achieving culturally aware language understanding becomes increasingly important. However, current research has focused on building cultural knowledge bases without studying how such knowledge leads to contextualized interpretations of texts. In this work, we operationalize cultural variations in language understanding through a natural language inference (NLI) task that surfaces cultural variations as label disagreement between annotators from different cultural groups. We introduce the first Culturally Aware Natural Language Inference (CALI) dataset with 2.7K premise-hypothesis pairs annotated by two cultural groups located in the U.S. and India. With CALI, we categorize how cultural norms affect language understanding and present an evaluation framework to assess at which levels large language models are culturally aware. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CulturallyAwareNLI.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.509
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7591–7609
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.509
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.509
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Huang and Diyi Yang. 2023. Culturally Aware Natural Language Inference. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7591–7609, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Culturally Aware Natural Language Inference (Huang & Yang, Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.509.pdf