Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zhou, Li, Karidi, Taelin, Liu, Wanlong, Garneau, Nicolas, Cao, Yong, Chen, Wenyu, Li, Haizhou, Hershcovich, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909479183843328
author Zhou, Li
Karidi, Taelin
Liu, Wanlong
Garneau, Nicolas
Cao, Yong
Chen, Wenyu
Li, Haizhou
Hershcovich, Daniel
author_facet Zhou, Li
Karidi, Taelin
Liu, Wanlong
Garneau, Nicolas
Cao, Yong
Chen, Wenyu
Li, Haizhou
Hershcovich, Daniel
contents Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain, a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs' ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge
Zhou, Li
Karidi, Taelin
Liu, Wanlong
Garneau, Nicolas
Cao, Yong
Chen, Wenyu
Li, Haizhou
Hershcovich, Daniel
Computation and Language
Recent studies have highlighted the presence of cultural biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet often lack a robust methodology to dissect these phenomena comprehensively. Our work aims to bridge this gap by delving into the Food domain, a universally relevant yet culturally diverse aspect of human life. We introduce FmLAMA, a multilingual dataset centered on food-related cultural facts and variations in food practices. We analyze LLMs across various architectures and configurations, evaluating their performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings. By leveraging templates in six different languages, we investigate how LLMs interact with language-specific and cultural knowledge. Our findings reveal that (1) LLMs demonstrate a pronounced bias towards food knowledge prevalent in the United States; (2) Incorporating relevant cultural context significantly improves LLMs' ability to access cultural knowledge; (3) The efficacy of LLMs in capturing cultural nuances is highly dependent on the interplay between the probing language, the specific model architecture, and the cultural context in question. This research underscores the complexity of integrating cultural understanding into LLMs and emphasizes the importance of culturally diverse datasets to mitigate biases and enhance model performance across different cultural domains.
title Does Mapo Tofu Contain Coffee? Probing LLMs for Food-related Cultural Knowledge
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06833