Bridging the Culture Gap: A Framework for LLM-Driven Socio-Cultural Localization of Math Word Problems in Low-Resource Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14913v3
• Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:29:49 GMT
• Title: Bridging the Culture Gap: A Framework for LLM-Driven Socio-Cultural Localization of Math Word Problems in Low-Resource Languages
• Authors: Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Dietrich Klakow, Philipp Slusallek, Anshuman Chhabra,
• Abstract summary: We introduce a framework for cultural localization of math word problems in languages other than English.<n>We find that translated benchmarks can obscure true multilingual math ability under appropriate socio-cultural contexts.<n>Our framework can help mitigate English-centric entity bias and improve robustness when native entities are introduced across various languages.
• Score: 32.87800105020907
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in solving mathematical problems expressed in natural language. However, multilingual and culturally-grounded mathematical reasoning in low-resource languages lags behind English due to the scarcity of socio-cultural task datasets that reflect accurate native entities such as person names, organization names, and currencies. Existing multilingual benchmarks are predominantly produced via translation and typically retain English-centric entities, owing to the high cost associated with human annotater-based localization. Moreover, automated localization tools are limited, and hence, truly localized datasets remain scarce. To bridge this gap, we introduce a framework for LLM-driven cultural localization of math word problems that automatically constructs datasets with native names, organizations, and currencies from existing sources. We find that translated benchmarks can obscure true multilingual math ability under appropriate socio-cultural contexts. Through extensive experiments, we also show that our framework can help mitigate English-centric entity bias and improves robustness when native entities are introduced across various languages.

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