Cross-Cultural Transfer of Commonsense Reasoning in LLMs: Evidence from the Arab World (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study examined the potential for cross-cultural transfer of commonsense reasoning . merely 12 culture-specific examples from one country can improve performance in others by 10% on average . |
| Approach: | They evaluate cross-cultural transfer of commonsense reasoning within the arab world . they use in-context learning and demonstration-based reinforcement to evaluate alignment methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve performance in cultures with cultural similarities in the Arab world by 10% on average. |
Similar Papers
Commonsense Reasoning in Arab Culture (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Abdelrahman Sadallah, Junior Cedric Tonga, Khalid Almubarak, Saeed Almheiri, Farah Atif, Chatrine Qwaider, Karima Kadaoui, Sara Shatnawi, Yaser Alesh, Fajri Koto
| Challenge: | Existing studies on commonsense reasoning in Arabic have relied on machine translations that lack cultural depth and introduce anglocentric biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning dataset in Arabic that covers 13 Arab countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. |
LLMs as Cultural Archives: Cultural Commonsense Knowledge Graph Extraction (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models encode rich cultural knowledge, but it remains mostly implicit and unstructured, limiting its interpretability and use. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative framework for constructing a Cultural Commonsense Knowledge Graph using a prompt-based framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cultural reasoning and story generation on non-English cultures. |
Cultural Benchmarking of LLMs in Standard and Dialectal Arabic Dialogues (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Saeed Almheiri, Momina Ahsan, Bilal Elbouardi, Younes Samih, Sarfraz Ahmad, Amr Keleg, Omar El Herraoui, Kareem Elzeky, Abed Alhakim Freihat, Mohamed Anwar, Zhuohan Xie, Junhong Liang, Mohammad Rustom Al Nasar, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto
| Challenge: | Most benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and each country’s respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs worse on all three tasks than the MSA benchmark. |
Palm: A Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse Dataset for Arabic LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Samar Mohamed Magdy, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Omer Nacar, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Reem Abdel-Salam, Hanin Atwany, Youssef Nafea, Abdulfattah Mohammed Yahya, Rahaf Alhamouri, Hamzah A. Alsayadi, Hiba Zayed, Sara Shatnawi, Serry Sibaee, Yasir Ech-chammakhy, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Marwa Mohamed Ali, Imen Jarraya, Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti, Aisha Alraeesi, Mohammed Anwar AL-Ghrawi, Abdulrahman S. Al-Batati, Elgizouli Mohamed, Noha Taha Elgindi, Muhammed Saeed, Houdaifa Atou, Issam Ait Yahia, Abdelhak Bouayad, Mohammed Machrouh, Amal Makouar, Dania Alkawi, Mukhtar Mohamed, Safaa Taher Abdelfadil, Amine Ziad Ounnoughene, Anfel Rouabhia, Rwaa Assi, Ahmed Sorkatti, Mohamedou Cheikh Tourad, Anis Koubaa, Ismail Berrada, Mustafa Jarrar, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | a year-long community-driven project covering all 22 Arab countries evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a project to evaluate the cultural and dialectal capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The project evaluates the cultural and dialectal capabilities of several frontier LLMs. |
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to represent the diversity of human experience and culturally sensitive topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment by prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in Arabic and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables users to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures. |
Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer (2026.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, yet their benefits remain concentrated in English and a small number of high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They fine-tuned large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluated zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. |
| Outcome: | The results show that models with weak baselines improve across all languages, whereas strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. |
Cross-Lingual Transfer of Cultural Knowledge: An Asymmetric Phenomenon (2025.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies evaluate whether large language models handle global cultural diversity . however, mechanisms behind cultural knowledge acquisition remain unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable framework to study cultural knowledge transfer in large language models . they observe bidirectional cultural transfer between English and other high-resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures training data transparency and controls transfer effects. |
ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit cultural bias from over-represented viewpoints in training data, yet cultural alignment remains a challenge due to limited cultural knowledge and a lack of exploration into effective learning approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-efficient method for fine-tuning large language models on native speakers’ word-association norms and a preference optimization method to improve cultural alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B on native speakers’ word-association norms and shows that such associations capture cultural knowledge. |
Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models: An Explanatory Analysis Based on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are deployed in many countries, but they fail to account for cultural variances among their potential users. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework to quantify cultural alignment using latent variable analysis to evaluate large language models against cultural dimensions of regions like the United States, China, and Arab countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared against LLMs in the United States, China, and Arab countries and demonstrates that all models struggle to grasp cultural values, while GPT-4 shows a unique capability to adapt to cultural nuances, particularly in Chinese settings. |
JAWAHER: A Multidialectal Dataset of Arabic Proverbs for LLM Benchmarking (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Samar Mohamed Magdy, Sang Yun Kwon, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Safaa Taher Abdelfadil, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | Recent advances in instruction fine-tuning and alignment methods have enhanced the adaptability of large language models to user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs’ capacity to comprehend and interpret Arabic proverbs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate accurate translations, but struggle to produce culturally nuanced and contextually relevant explanations. |