Cultural Grounding in Swedish: Extending an Everyday Knowledge Benchmark for LLMs

Meriem Beloucif, Johan Sjons


Abstract
Benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on everyday knowledge across cultures and languages are increasingly used to assess cultural competence and contextual understanding. However, many multilingual extensions rely primarily on translated question–answer pairs, limiting their ability to capture locally grounded variation. In this work, we present a Swedish extension of an existing cross-cultural everyday knowledge benchmark in which questions are translated into Swedish, and answers are individually collected from five participants, coming from diverse social and professional backgrounds. This design enables us to capture culturally situated, naturally produced responses rather than transferred or translated answer templates. We document the translation protocol, annotators, and agreement analysis, and examine variation across annotators as a signal of culturally contingent knowledge. We evaluate several state-of-the-art multilingual and instruction-tuned LLMs against the aggregated human responses and analyze model performance. Our results reveal that while models often approximate prototypical answers, they struggle with culturally specific nuances and intra-cultural variation. The Swedish extension provides a resource for studying culturally grounded evaluation and highlights the importance of human-generated local answers when benchmarking LLMs across languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.resourceful-4.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Felix Morger, Nikolai Ilinykh, Barbara Scalvini, Simon Dobnik, Dana Dannélls
Venues:
RESOURCEFUL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
25–31
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-resourceful-03
DOI:
10.63317/5mct9t9w6mu2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meriem Beloucif and Johan Sjons. 2026. Cultural Grounding in Swedish: Extending an Everyday Knowledge Benchmark for LLMs. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026), pages 25–31, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Cultural Grounding in Swedish: Extending an Everyday Knowledge Benchmark for LLMs (Beloucif & Sjons, RESOURCEFUL 2026)
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