From National Curricula to Cultural Awareness: Constructing Open-Ended Culture-Specific Question Answering Dataset

Haneul Yoo, Won Ik Cho, Geunhye Kim, Ji Yoon Han


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on many tasks, but their progress remains uneven across languages and cultures, often reflecting values latent in English-centric training data. To enable practical cultural alignment, we propose a scalable approach that leverages national social studies curricula as a foundation for culture-aware supervision. We introduce CuCu, an automated multi-agent LLM framework that transforms national textbook curricula into open-ended, culture-specific question–answer pairs for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Applying CuCu to the Korean national social studies curriculum, we construct KCaQA, comprising 34.1k open-ended QA pairs. Our analyses and training experiments suggest that KCaQA covers culture-specific topics and produces responses grounded in local sociocultural contexts.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.750
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17353–17372
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.750/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haneul Yoo, Won Ik Cho, Geunhye Kim, and Ji Yoon Han. 2026. From National Curricula to Cultural Awareness: Constructing Open-Ended Culture-Specific Question Answering Dataset. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 17353–17372, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From National Curricula to Cultural Awareness: Constructing Open-Ended Culture-Specific Question Answering Dataset (Yoo et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.750.pdf