CULTURALLY YOURS: A Reading Assistant for Cross-Cultural Content

Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Harshit Budhiraja, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury


Abstract
Users from diverse cultural backgrounds frequently face challenges in understanding content from various online sources that are written by people from a different culture. This paper presents CULTURALLY YOURS (CY), a first-of-its-kind cultural reading assistant tool designed to identify culture-specific items (CSIs) for users from varying cultural contexts. By leveraging principles of relevance feedback and using culture as a prior, our tool personalizes to the user’s preferences based on the interaction of the user with the tool. CY can be powered by any LLM that can reason with cultural background of the user and the input text in English, provided as a part of the prompt that are iteratively refined as the user keeps interacting with the system. In this demo, we use GPT-4o as the back-end. We conduct a user study across 13 users from 8 different geographies. The results demonstrate CY’s effectiveness in enhancing user engagement and personalization alongside comprehension of cross-cultural content.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-demos.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Brodie Mather, Mark Dras
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–216
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-demos.21/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Harshit Budhiraja, Sougata Saha, and Monojit Choudhury. 2025. CULTURALLY YOURS: A Reading Assistant for Cross-Cultural Content. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 208–216, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CULTURALLY YOURS: A Reading Assistant for Cross-Cultural Content (Pandey et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-demos.21.pdf