Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models

Shaily Bhatt, Fernando Diaz


Abstract
Productive interactions between diverse users and language technologies require outputs from the latter to be culturally relevant and sensitive. Prior works have evaluated models’ knowledge of cultural norms, values, and artefacts, without considering how this knowledge manifests in downstream applications. In this work, we focus on extrinsic evaluation of cultural competence in two text generation tasks, open-ended question answering and story generation. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate model outputs when an explicit cue of culture, specifically nationality, is perturbed in the prompts. Although we find that model outputs do vary when varying nationalities and feature culturally relevant words, we also find weak correlations between text similarity of outputs for different countries and the cultural values of these countries. Finally, we discuss important considerations in designing comprehensive evaluation of cultural competence in user-facing tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.942
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16055–16074
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.942
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shaily Bhatt and Fernando Diaz. 2024. Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 16055–16074, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models (Bhatt & Diaz, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.942.pdf