Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09637v1
• Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2025 04:51:59 GMT
• Title: Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness
• Authors: Sougata Saha, Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Monojit Choudhury,
• Abstract summary: We argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an AI system.<n>We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those.
• Score: 11.98067475490853
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Numerous recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased towards a Western and Anglo-centric worldview, which compromises their usefulness in non-Western cultural settings. However, "culture" is a complex, multifaceted topic, and its awareness, representation, and modeling in LLMs and LLM-based applications can be defined and measured in numerous ways. In this position paper, we ask what does it mean for an LLM to possess "cultural awareness", and through a thought experiment, which is an extension of the Octopus test proposed by Bender and Koller (2020), we argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an LLM and LLM-based AI system that will make it useful across various, including completely unseen, cultures. We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those.

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