Implicit Cultural Identity Signals in Language: Detection and Effects in Negotiation Dialogue

Bin Han, Danah Yun, James Hale, Jonathan Gratch


Abstract
Language conveys cultural identity even when not intentionally disclosed. This study examines cultural signals in task-oriented dialogue using English negotiations from the KODIS dataset. We focus our analysis on participants from four countries: the US, UK, Mexico, and South Korea. Interacting anonymously under identical conditions, we evaluated whether a speaker’s country could be inferred from dialogue by zero-shot LLMs and embedding-based classifiers. Results show that while objective negotiation outcomes remained similar across groups, subjective perceptions varied significantly. Embedding-based models reliably identified country of origin, whereas zero-shot LLM performance dropped under distribution shift. These findings suggest that cultural identity-related signals are embedded in language and may be relevant for analyzing negotiation dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2026.socon-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Context (SoCon) and the 2nd Workshop on Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions (NLPSI) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Marco Antonio Stranisci, Neele Falk, Sofie Labat, Soda Marem Lo, Aswathy Velutharambath, Sabine Weber, Rossana Damiano, Simona Frenda, Veronique Hoste, Bennett Kleinberg, Roman Klinger, Viviana Patti, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Maarten Sap, Seid Muhie Yimam
Venues:
SoCon | NLPSI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
34–39
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-soconnlpsi-04
DOI:
10.63317/5na535kz35g8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bin Han, Danah Yun, James Hale, and Jonathan Gratch. 2026. Implicit Cultural Identity Signals in Language: Detection and Effects in Negotiation Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Context (SoCon) and the 2nd Workshop on Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions (NLPSI) @ LREC 2026, pages 34–39, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Implicit Cultural Identity Signals in Language: Detection and Effects in Negotiation Dialogue (Han et al., SoCon-NLPSI 2026)
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