Papers by Mai Alkhamissi
Beyond Understanding: Evaluating the Pragmatic Gap in LLMs’ Cultural Processing of Figurative Language (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using figurative language as a proxy for cultural nuance and local knowledge, large language models struggle with connotative meaning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate large language models' ability to process culturally grounded language . they use figurative language as a proxy for cultural nuance and local knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can understand and use figurative expressions that encode local knowledge and social nuance. |
Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lens (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | anthropological accounts of culture often focus on static facts or homogeneous values . large language models are being implemented in translation systems, educational tools and search engines . |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize how benchmarks frame culture such as knowledge, preference, performance, or bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework categorizes how benchmarks frame culture, such as knowledge, preference, performance, or bias. |
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |