Sociocultural norms serve as guiding principles for personal conduct in social interactions within a particular society or culture. The study of norm discovery has seen significant development over the last few years, with various interesting approaches. However, it is difficult to adopt these approaches to discover norms in a new culture, as they rely either on human annotations or real-world dialogue contents. This paper presents a robust automatic norm discovery pipeline, which utilizes the cultural knowledge of GPT-3.5 Turbo (ChatGPT) along with several social factors. By using these social factors and ChatGPT, our pipeline avoids the use of human dialogues that tend to be limited to specific scenarios, as well as the use of human annotations that make it difficult and costly to enlarge the dataset. The resulting database - Multi-cultural Norm Base (MNB) - covers 6 distinct cultures, with over 150k sociocultural norm statements in total. A state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM), Llama 3, fine-tuned with our proposed dataset, shows remarkable results on various downstream tasks, outperforming models fine-tuned on other datasets significantly.

Norm violations occur when individuals fail to conform to culturally accepted behaviors, which may lead to potential conflicts. Remediating norm violations requires social awareness and cultural sensitivity of the nuances at play. To equip interactive AI systems with a remediation ability, we offer ReNoVi — a large-scale corpus of 9,258 multi-turn dialogues annotated with social norms, as well as define a sequence of tasks to help understand and remediate norm violations step by step. ReNoVi consists of two parts: 512 human-authored dialogues (real data), and 8,746 synthetic conversations generated by ChatGPT through prompt learning. While collecting sufficient human-authored data is costly, synthetic conversations provide suitable amounts of data to help mitigate the scarcity of training data, as well as the chance to assess the alignment between LLMs and humans in the awareness of social norms. We thus harness the power of ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data for our task. To ensure the quality of both human-authored and synthetic data, we follow a quality control protocol during data collection. Our experimental results demonstrate the importance of remediating norm violations in socio-cultural conversations, as well as the improvement in performance obtained from synthetic data.

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model’s ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.