The chapter discusses how large language models (LLMs) simplify the transformation of cultural material into analyzable variables and how LLM-driven agentic systems broaden machine assistance across research workflows. It examines key aspects of this emerging paradigm and its broader implications, arguing that LLMs increase scale, methodological diversity, and delegation while largely preserving the fundamental logic that underpins cultural measurement and claim formation.
The article discusses the rise of large language models (LLMs) and their growing influence on our decisions and actions. It explores the concept of agentic LLMs—LLMs that can act directly in the real world and interact with one another. The book aims to explain how these agentic LLMs function, their capabilities, and the implications for users.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent national cultural change over time, using more than two decades of World Values Survey data and the Inglehart‑Welzel cultural map. It finds that while LLMs generally place countries near their most recent surveyed positions, their representations lag behind current data, under‑capture the magnitude of change, introduce spurious movements, and rarely reproduce trajectory reversals. These temporal inaccuracies reveal a flattening effect that limits the models’ cultural awareness and raises concerns for evaluation, representational harms, and governance of culturally aware AI systems.
arXiv:2609.22494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Cultural NLP, with substantial efforts to create globally inclusive NLP systems. The rapid growt...
The paper introduces CAPRI, a dataset of conversations designed to test whether large language models (LLMs) can adapt their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds. Experiments show that while LLMs can infer a user’s cultural context and recall relevant conventions, they frequently fail to apply this knowledge when generating answers unless explicitly prompted to do so. The study also finds that LLMs’ cultural adaptations improve as more cues are provided, yet their default priors are not culture‑neutral and sometimes reflect the model’s country of origin.
arXiv:2512. 07195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent role-playing has recently shown promise for studying social behavior with language agents, but existing simulations are mostly monolingual without cross-lingual interaction, an essential property of real societies.
WorldBench is a new multilingual benchmark that tests large language model agents on culturally grounded everyday workflows, offering 1,600 tasks in seven languages and eight cultures. The benchmark evaluates agents through structured sandbox actions and introduces Constrained Task Success (CTS), a metric that assesses task completion, minimal modification, and other complementary aspects via deterministic and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations. Experiments show that even leading models achieve only 49.2% CTS, revealing significant gaps in correctness and state preservation across languages and cultures.
arXiv:2508. 08879v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The growing deployment of large language models (LLMs) across diverse cultural contexts necessitates a deeper understanding of models' hidden representations of different cultures.
The article introduces the concept of Agentic Large Language Models, which extend traditional LLMs by enabling them to act directly in the real world and interact with one another. It outlines how these agentic LLMs function, their mechanisms for action, and the implications of their capabilities for users. The discussion highlights the growing influence of LLMs on decision-making and explores the potential shifts in how we engage with AI tools.
arXiv:2607. 20241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms.
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.
The paper investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Culture-Related Open Questions (CROQ) dataset, which contains 24‑language questions about generic culture. Experiments reveal that LLMs disproportionately favor Japan in their responses, especially when prompted in high‑resource languages, while low‑resource languages tend to highlight countries where the language is official. The study also finds that these biases emerge after supervised fine‑tuning rather than during pre‑training.
arXiv:2506. 17467v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential to change how we write, communicate, and create, leading to rapid adoption across society.