CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Belay, Tadesse Destaw, Ahmed, Ahmed Haj, Grissom II, Alvin, Ameer, Iqra, Sidorov, Grigori, Kolesnikova, Olga, Yimam, Seid Muhie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Belay, Tadesse Destaw
Ahmed, Ahmed Haj
Grissom II, Alvin
Ameer, Iqra
Sidorov, Grigori
Kolesnikova, Olga
Yimam, Seid Muhie
author_facet Belay, Tadesse Destaw
Ahmed, Ahmed Haj
Grissom II, Alvin
Ameer, Iqra
Sidorov, Grigori
Kolesnikova, Olga
Yimam, Seid Muhie
contents NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10688
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding
Belay, Tadesse Destaw
Ahmed, Ahmed Haj
Grissom II, Alvin
Ameer, Iqra
Sidorov, Grigori
Kolesnikova, Olga
Yimam, Seid Muhie
Computation and Language
NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.
title CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10688