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
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.
By Paarth Singh Rathore
VakyArth is the first pragmatic benchmark for Indic languages, covering Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. It tests models on five pragmatic phenomena—deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics, and coherence—using multiple-choice questions, natural language inference, and translation tasks authored by native speakers. Evaluation of multilingual LLMs shows consistent failures on pragmatic meanings rooted in Indic linguistic and cultural conventions, with systematic differences across languages and tasks.
By Usneek Singh, Poorvaja Veera Balaji Kumar, Parth Nanda, Anand Madhusoodanan, Geyang Guo, Wei Xu, Junyi Jessy L
arXiv:2607. 02369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs stage a new form of cultural encounter that is massive, automated, and monolingual.
By Nina Begus