Tailored Emotional LLM-Supporter: Enhancing Cultural Sensitivity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Chen Cecilia, Arnaout, Hiba, Kovačić, Nils, Atzil-Slonim, Dana, Gurevych, Iryna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Chen Cecilia
Arnaout, Hiba
Kovačić, Nils
Atzil-Slonim, Dana
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Liu, Chen Cecilia
Arnaout, Hiba
Kovačić, Nils
Atzil-Slonim, Dana
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Large language models (LLMs) show promise in offering emotional support and generating empathetic responses for individuals in distress, but their ability to deliver culturally sensitive support remains underexplored due to a lack of resources. In this work, we introduce CultureCare, the first dataset designed for this task, spanning four cultures and including 1729 distress messages, 1523 cultural signals, and 1041 support strategies with fine-grained emotional and cultural annotations. Leveraging CultureCare, we (i) develop and test four adaptation strategies for guiding three state-of-the-art LLMs toward culturally sensitive responses; (ii) conduct comprehensive evaluations using LLM-as-a-Judge, in-culture human annotators, and clinical psychologists; (iii) show that adapted LLMs outperform anonymous online peer responses, and that simple cultural role-play is insufficient for cultural sensitivity; and (iv) explore the application of LLMs in clinical training, where experts highlight their potential in fostering cultural competence in novice therapists.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tailored Emotional LLM-Supporter: Enhancing Cultural Sensitivity
Liu, Chen Cecilia
Arnaout, Hiba
Kovačić, Nils
Atzil-Slonim, Dana
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in offering emotional support and generating empathetic responses for individuals in distress, but their ability to deliver culturally sensitive support remains underexplored due to a lack of resources. In this work, we introduce CultureCare, the first dataset designed for this task, spanning four cultures and including 1729 distress messages, 1523 cultural signals, and 1041 support strategies with fine-grained emotional and cultural annotations. Leveraging CultureCare, we (i) develop and test four adaptation strategies for guiding three state-of-the-art LLMs toward culturally sensitive responses; (ii) conduct comprehensive evaluations using LLM-as-a-Judge, in-culture human annotators, and clinical psychologists; (iii) show that adapted LLMs outperform anonymous online peer responses, and that simple cultural role-play is insufficient for cultural sensitivity; and (iv) explore the application of LLMs in clinical training, where experts highlight their potential in fostering cultural competence in novice therapists.
title Tailored Emotional LLM-Supporter: Enhancing Cultural Sensitivity
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07902