@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2025-culture,
title = "Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural {NLP}",
author = "Zhou, Naitian and
Bamman, David and
Bleaman, Isaac L.",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1256/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1256",
pages = "25869--25886",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP."
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<abstract>The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP
%A Zhou, Naitian
%A Bamman, David
%A Bleaman, Isaac L.
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F zhou-etal-2025-culture
%X The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1256
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1256/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1256
%P 25869-25886
Markdown (Informal)
[Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1256/) (Zhou et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Naitian Zhou, David Bamman, and Isaac L. Bleaman. 2025. Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 25869–25886, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.