Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zou, Chenye, Wen, Xingyue, Hu, Tianyi, Wang, Qian Janice, Hershcovich, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909791263129600
author Zou, Chenye
Wen, Xingyue
Hu, Tianyi
Wang, Qian Janice
Hershcovich, Daniel
author_facet Zou, Chenye
Wen, Xingyue
Hu, Tianyi
Wang, Qian Janice
Hershcovich, Daniel
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to culture-aware language tasks. We introduce the novel problem of adapting wine reviews across Chinese and English, which goes beyond literal translation by incorporating regional taste preferences and culture-specific flavor descriptors. In a case study on cross-cultural wine review adaptation, we compile the first parallel corpus of professional reviews, containing 8k Chinese and 16k Anglophone reviews. We benchmark both neural-machine-translation baselines and state-of-the-art LLMs with automatic metrics and human evaluation. For the latter, we propose three culture-oriented criteria -- Cultural Proximity, Cultural Neutrality, and Cultural Genuineness -- to assess how naturally a translated review resonates with target-culture readers. Our analysis shows that current models struggle to capture cultural nuances, especially in translating wine descriptions across different cultures. This highlights the challenges and limitations of translation models in handling cultural content.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12961
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews
Zou, Chenye
Wen, Xingyue
Hu, Tianyi
Wang, Qian Janice
Hershcovich, Daniel
Computation and Language
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to culture-aware language tasks. We introduce the novel problem of adapting wine reviews across Chinese and English, which goes beyond literal translation by incorporating regional taste preferences and culture-specific flavor descriptors. In a case study on cross-cultural wine review adaptation, we compile the first parallel corpus of professional reviews, containing 8k Chinese and 16k Anglophone reviews. We benchmark both neural-machine-translation baselines and state-of-the-art LLMs with automatic metrics and human evaluation. For the latter, we propose three culture-oriented criteria -- Cultural Proximity, Cultural Neutrality, and Cultural Genuineness -- to assess how naturally a translated review resonates with target-culture readers. Our analysis shows that current models struggle to capture cultural nuances, especially in translating wine descriptions across different cultures. This highlights the challenges and limitations of translation models in handling cultural content.
title Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12961