@inproceedings{saha-etal-2025-meta,
title = "Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness",
author = "Saha, Sougata and
Pandey, Saurabh Kumar and
Choudhury, Monojit",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.408/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.408",
pages = "8025--8042",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
abstract = "Numerous recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased towards a Western and Anglo-centric worldview, which compromises their usefulness in non-Western cultural settings. However, ``culture'' is a complex, multifaceted topic, and its awareness, representation, and modeling in LLMs and LLM-based applications can be defined and measured in numerous ways. In this position paper, we ask what does it mean for an LLM to possess ``cultural awareness'', and through a thought experiment, which is an extension of the Octopus test proposed by Bender and Koller (2020), we argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an LLM and LLM-based AI system that will make it useful across various, including completely unseen, cultures. We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those."
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<abstract>Numerous recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased towards a Western and Anglo-centric worldview, which compromises their usefulness in non-Western cultural settings. However, “culture” is a complex, multifaceted topic, and its awareness, representation, and modeling in LLMs and LLM-based applications can be defined and measured in numerous ways. In this position paper, we ask what does it mean for an LLM to possess “cultural awareness”, and through a thought experiment, which is an extension of the Octopus test proposed by Bender and Koller (2020), we argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an LLM and LLM-based AI system that will make it useful across various, including completely unseen, cultures. We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness
%A Saha, Sougata
%A Pandey, Saurabh Kumar
%A Choudhury, Monojit
%Y Chiruzzo, Luis
%Y Ritter, Alan
%Y Wang, Lu
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 April
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Albuquerque, New Mexico
%@ 979-8-89176-189-6
%F saha-etal-2025-meta
%X Numerous recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased towards a Western and Anglo-centric worldview, which compromises their usefulness in non-Western cultural settings. However, “culture” is a complex, multifaceted topic, and its awareness, representation, and modeling in LLMs and LLM-based applications can be defined and measured in numerous ways. In this position paper, we ask what does it mean for an LLM to possess “cultural awareness”, and through a thought experiment, which is an extension of the Octopus test proposed by Bender and Koller (2020), we argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an LLM and LLM-based AI system that will make it useful across various, including completely unseen, cultures. We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.408
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.408/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.408
%P 8025-8042
Markdown (Informal)
[Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness](https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.408/) (Saha et al., NAACL 2025)
ACL
- Sougata Saha, Saurabh Kumar Pandey, and Monojit Choudhury. 2025. Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8025–8042, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.