Challenge: Identical linguistic expressions can convey different sentiments across cultural contexts . current multilingual models often reduce language to symbolic representation . cultural misalignment is a structural bottleneck, authors say .
Approach: They conduct an empirical study to quantify the influence of culture on cross-lingual sentiment transfer across 7 common SMLMs and 5 linguistically diverse languages.
Outcome: The proposed model disentangles cultural factors from confounding variables and shows cultural distance is a negative predictor of transfer performance.

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Cross-Cultural Similarity Features for Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning of Pragmatically Motivated Tasks (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: a large amount of work on cross-lingual transfer learning focused on typological and genealogical similarities between languages.
Approach: They propose three features that capture cross-cultural similarities that manifest in linguistic patterns and quantify distinct aspects of language pragmatics.
Outcome: The proposed features capture cross-cultural similarities manifest in linguistic patterns and quantify aspects of language pragmatics.
Cross-lingual Transfer Can Worsen Bias in Sentiment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing evidence of demographic bias in SA systems is limited to a handful of languages, and it is costly to create supervised training data in a new language.
Approach: They use counterfactual evaluation to test whether gender or racial biases are imported when using cross-lingual transfer . r&r is much more prevalent than gender biase .
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Cultural Bias Matters: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark Dataset and Sentiment-Enriched Model for Understanding Multimodal Metaphors (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a multicultural multimodal metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English.
Outcome: The proposed model improves metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds and cultural domains.
Cross-Lingual Transfer of Cultural Knowledge: An Asymmetric Phenomenon (2025.acl-short)

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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 .
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Global MMLU: Understanding and Addressing Cultural and Linguistic Biases in Multilingual Evaluation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reliable multilingual evaluation is difficult and culturally appropriate evaluation is even harder to achieve.
Approach: They propose a multilingual evaluation framework that aims to mitigate these biases by improving translations and annotation practices.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves translation quality and cultural coverage and is culturally sensitive and culturally agnostic.
Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languages (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Currently, studies on bias and fairness in natural language processing focus on a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across languages for individual attributes.
Approach: They adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for race, religion, nationality, and gender.
Outcome: The proposed model favors groups that are dominant in each language's culture, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning.
The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages.
Approach: They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations.
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The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multilingual models can be used to integrate multiple languages into one model and use cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose to include languages in popular multilingual models and to use cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different NLP tasks.
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Analyzing the Effect of Linguistic Similarity on Cross-Lingual Transfer: Tasks and Experimental Setups Matter (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work on cross-lingual transfer often focuses on a small set of languages from a few language families and/or a single task.
Approach: They analyze cross-lingual transfer for 263 languages from a wide variety of language families . they include three popular NLP tasks: POS tagging, dependency parsing, topic classification .
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Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Various efforts have been made to accommodate linguistic diversity and serve speakers of many different languages.
Approach: They propose a framework to examine cultural differences in NLP to better serve users . they argue that cultural knowledge, preferences and values can affect NLP practices .
Outcome: The proposed framework examines how cultural knowledge, preferences and values can affect NLP practices.

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