Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908455187513344 |
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| author | Zhou, Naitian Bamman, David Bleaman, Isaac L. |
| author_facet | Zhou, Naitian Bamman, David Bleaman, Isaac L. |
| contents | The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12057 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP Zhou, Naitian Bamman, David Bleaman, Isaac L. Computation and Language Computers and Society The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP. |
| title | Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP |
| topic | Computation and Language Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12057 |