The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing.
arXiv:2608. 12278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence tools for education and language support are increasingly framed as scalable responses to access gaps in under-resourced communities.
By Avijit Roy, Proma Roy
arXiv:2606. 24172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: More than a billion people communicate in Indic languages, yet the natural language processing infrastructure serving them remains fragmented and underdeveloped.
By Ritwik Banerjee, Lav R. Varshney
arXiv:2607. 02369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs stage a new form of cultural encounter that is massive, automated, and monolingual.
By Nina Begus
arXiv:2607. 23319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages.
By Poornima Kumaresan, Pavithra Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
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.
By Mohsinul Kabir, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Mezbaur Rahman, Shaoxiong Ji, Hassan Alhuzali, Yuechen Jiang, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou
Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalent content can require substantially different token counts across languages, affecting API cost, latency, and usable context length before a model is invoked.
arXiv:2606. 26112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-resource languages face a critical challenge in AI development: creating specialized conversational systems without access to massive training corpora.
By Siddhant Hitesh Mantri, Dhara Gorasiya, Malhar Kulkarni, Pushpak Bhattacharya
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.
By Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Mika H\"am\"al\"ainen
arXiv:2607. 11808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) framework for AI-assisted lexicography.
By Antonio San Martin, Catherine Trekker
arXiv:2607. 24276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) process text through subword tokenizers rather than directly reading characters or words.
By Priyansh Srivastava
arXiv:2606. 28333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: \begin{quote} The biases in Large Language Models' (LLMs) outputs remain inadequately theorised, particularly from the perspective of the Global South.
By Sioux McKenna, Nompilo Tshuma