Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bhatt, Shaily, August, Tal, Antoniak, Maria
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Bhatt, Shaily
August, Tal
Antoniak, Maria
author_facet Bhatt, Shaily
August, Tal
Antoniak, Maria
contents Improving cultural competence of language technologies is important. However most recent works rarely engage with the communities they study, and instead rely on synthetic setups and imperfect proxies of culture. In this work, we take a human-centered approach to discover and measure language-based cultural norms, and cultural competence of LLMs. We focus on a single kind of culture, research cultures, and a single task, adapting writing across research cultures. Through a set of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers, who are experts at moving between cultures, we create a framework of structural, stylistic, rhetorical, and citational norms that vary across research cultures. We operationalise these features with a suite of computational metrics and use them for (a) surfacing latent cultural norms in human-written research papers at scale; and (b) highlighting the lack of cultural competence of LLMs, and their tendency to homogenise writing. Overall, our work illustrates the efficacy of a human-centered approach to measuring cultural norms in human-written and LLM-generated texts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00784
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures
Bhatt, Shaily
August, Tal
Antoniak, Maria
Computation and Language
Improving cultural competence of language technologies is important. However most recent works rarely engage with the communities they study, and instead rely on synthetic setups and imperfect proxies of culture. In this work, we take a human-centered approach to discover and measure language-based cultural norms, and cultural competence of LLMs. We focus on a single kind of culture, research cultures, and a single task, adapting writing across research cultures. Through a set of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers, who are experts at moving between cultures, we create a framework of structural, stylistic, rhetorical, and citational norms that vary across research cultures. We operationalise these features with a suite of computational metrics and use them for (a) surfacing latent cultural norms in human-written research papers at scale; and (b) highlighting the lack of cultural competence of LLMs, and their tendency to homogenise writing. Overall, our work illustrates the efficacy of a human-centered approach to measuring cultural norms in human-written and LLM-generated texts.
title Research Borderlands: Analysing Writing Across Research Cultures
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00784