Unveiling Cultural Blind Spots: Analyzing the Limitations of mLLMs in Procedural Text Comprehension

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yari, Amir Hossein, Koto, Fajri
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yari, Amir Hossein
Koto, Fajri
author_facet Yari, Amir Hossein
Koto, Fajri
contents Despite the impressive performance of multilingual large language models (mLLMs) in various natural language processing tasks, their ability to understand procedural texts, particularly those with culture-specific content, remains largely unexplored. Texts describing cultural procedures, including rituals, traditional craftsmanship, and social etiquette, require an inherent understanding of cultural context, presenting a significant challenge for mLLMs. In this work, we introduce CAPTex, a benchmark designed to evaluate mLLMs' ability to process and reason about culturally diverse procedural texts across multiple languages using various methodologies to assess their performance. Our findings indicate that (1) mLLMs face difficulties with culturally contextualized procedural texts, showing notable performance declines in low-resource languages, (2) model performance fluctuates across cultural domains, with some areas presenting greater difficulties, and (3) language models exhibit better performance on multiple-choice tasks within conversational frameworks compared to direct questioning. These results underscore the current limitations of mLLMs in handling culturally nuanced procedural texts and highlight the need for culturally aware benchmarks like CAPTex to enhance their adaptability and comprehension across diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_14315
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling Cultural Blind Spots: Analyzing the Limitations of mLLMs in Procedural Text Comprehension
Yari, Amir Hossein
Koto, Fajri
Computation and Language
Despite the impressive performance of multilingual large language models (mLLMs) in various natural language processing tasks, their ability to understand procedural texts, particularly those with culture-specific content, remains largely unexplored. Texts describing cultural procedures, including rituals, traditional craftsmanship, and social etiquette, require an inherent understanding of cultural context, presenting a significant challenge for mLLMs. In this work, we introduce CAPTex, a benchmark designed to evaluate mLLMs' ability to process and reason about culturally diverse procedural texts across multiple languages using various methodologies to assess their performance. Our findings indicate that (1) mLLMs face difficulties with culturally contextualized procedural texts, showing notable performance declines in low-resource languages, (2) model performance fluctuates across cultural domains, with some areas presenting greater difficulties, and (3) language models exhibit better performance on multiple-choice tasks within conversational frameworks compared to direct questioning. These results underscore the current limitations of mLLMs in handling culturally nuanced procedural texts and highlight the need for culturally aware benchmarks like CAPTex to enhance their adaptability and comprehension across diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes.
title Unveiling Cultural Blind Spots: Analyzing the Limitations of mLLMs in Procedural Text Comprehension
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14315