Towards Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lertvittayakumjorn, Piyawat, Kinney, David, Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar, Martin Jr., Donald, Dev, Sunipa
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Lertvittayakumjorn, Piyawat
Kinney, David
Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar
Martin Jr., Donald
Dev, Sunipa
author_facet Lertvittayakumjorn, Piyawat
Kinney, David
Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar
Martin Jr., Donald
Dev, Sunipa
contents Generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated gaps in diverse cultural awareness across the globe. We investigate the effect of retrieval augmented generation and search-grounding techniques on LLMs' ability to display familiarity with various national cultures. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard LLMs, LLMs augmented with retrievals from a bespoke knowledge base (i.e., KB grounding), and LLMs augmented with retrievals from a web search (i.e., search grounding) on multiple cultural awareness benchmarks. We find that search grounding significantly improves the LLM performance on multiple-choice benchmarks that test propositional knowledge (e.g., cultural norms, artifacts, and institutions), while KB grounding's effectiveness is limited by inadequate knowledge base coverage and a suboptimal retriever. However, search grounding also increases the risk of stereotypical judgments by language models and fails to improve evaluators' judgments of cultural familiarity in a human evaluation with adequate statistical power. These results highlight the distinction between propositional cultural knowledge and open-ended cultural fluency when it comes to evaluating LLMs' cultural awareness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations
Lertvittayakumjorn, Piyawat
Kinney, David
Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar
Martin Jr., Donald
Dev, Sunipa
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated gaps in diverse cultural awareness across the globe. We investigate the effect of retrieval augmented generation and search-grounding techniques on LLMs' ability to display familiarity with various national cultures. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard LLMs, LLMs augmented with retrievals from a bespoke knowledge base (i.e., KB grounding), and LLMs augmented with retrievals from a web search (i.e., search grounding) on multiple cultural awareness benchmarks. We find that search grounding significantly improves the LLM performance on multiple-choice benchmarks that test propositional knowledge (e.g., cultural norms, artifacts, and institutions), while KB grounding's effectiveness is limited by inadequate knowledge base coverage and a suboptimal retriever. However, search grounding also increases the risk of stereotypical judgments by language models and fails to improve evaluators' judgments of cultural familiarity in a human evaluation with adequate statistical power. These results highlight the distinction between propositional cultural knowledge and open-ended cultural fluency when it comes to evaluating LLMs' cultural awareness.
title Towards Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13497