arXiv:2610.08303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current evaluation of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) rests on an implicit Translation-Isomorphism Assumption (TIA): that semantic structures...
The study investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle diverse Indian oral traditions, using the Rajasthani Pabuji epic, Tamil Sangam poetry, and Bengali folk tales as case studies. By prompting Claude Sonnet and Gemini with 54 generation requests across generic, culturally specific, and regional-language prompts, the authors measured reference drift and cross-tradition convergence using Sentence‑BERT embeddings. Results show that while outputs stay closer to their own tradition than to others, there is significant cross‑tradition similarity (0.52–0.66), indicating partial homogenisation; moreover, regional‑language prompting consistently reduced fidelity to authentic traditions.
arXiv:2608.20351v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask whether stereotype-loaded queries about culturally marked people leak more personal information from a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) sy...
The paper introduces a generation benchmark for culturally specific kinship terms, evaluating five open‑weight large language models (LLMs) on Hindi, Tamil, and Korean. Unlike prior multiple‑choice tests that treat kinship understanding as a recognition task, the study prompts LLMs to generate terms across two communicative tasks and compares results to a matched option‑supported baseline. Findings show that while models like GPT‑OSS120B and Llama‑3.370B can select correct terms in over 90% and 78% of cases respectively, they produce the correct term only 36% and 24% of the time, indicating a significant evaluation‑format gap and highlighting the difficulty of culturally specific kinship generation even when relationships are explicitly stated.
arXiv:2606. 07422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to answer culturally grounded questions across languages, yet it remains unclear whether local cultural knowledge is better accessed through English or the local language.
MemeCULT-1K is a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, each paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, plus an additional set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. The study evaluates thirteen vision‑language models under meme‑only and context‑aware settings, showing that providing minimal cultural context consistently improves performance across all models and languages. Error analysis indicates closed‑source models struggle with entity and reference misidentification, while open‑source models are limited by broader cultural knowledge gaps, especially in linguistic and phonological aspects.
Camellia is a new benchmark that tests cultural bias in large language models (LLMs) across nine Asian languages and six Asian cultures. It contains 19,530 manually annotated entities linked to Asian or Western cultures and 2,173 masked social‑media contexts for these entities. Using Camellia, the authors evaluate four multilingual LLMs on cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA, finding that models struggle with cultural adaptation, exhibit differing biases across regions and families, and have difficulty understanding context in some Asian languages.
Current literature evaluates large language models (LLMs) on multilingual kinship understanding using multiple choice benchmarks, treating it as a recognition problem. We instead prompt five open weig...
The study evaluates how different input representations—orthographic text, IPA transcription, and romanization—affect cross‑lingual transfer in autoregressive multilingual language models. Across three model sizes and eight languages grouped into typologically motivated pairs, romanized pretraining consistently outperforms native orthography and IPA, especially as model scale increases. Fine‑tuning a text‑pretrained model on romanized data can harm performance on languages already covered by the base model, suggesting romanization should be integrated at pretraining rather than applied later.
arXiv:2608. 02486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLMs reliably name Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor, but recover their counterparts in less-represented traditions like Finnish, Slavic, Egyptian, or Chinese mythology far less consistently.
arXiv:2605.29637v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models often exhibit a substantial gap between their performance in English and in lower-resourced languages on equivalent knowledge...
arXiv:2601. 14063v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cross-cultural competence in large language models (LLMs) requires understanding and adapting Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) across varying cultural contexts.