DIWALI: Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Context

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Main Authors: Sahoo, Pramit, Brahma, Maharaj, Desarkar, Maunendra Sankar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sahoo, Pramit
Brahma, Maharaj
Desarkar, Maunendra Sankar
author_facet Sahoo, Pramit
Brahma, Maharaj
Desarkar, Maunendra Sankar
contents Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in various tasks and applications. However, despite their wide capabilities, they are shown to lack cultural alignment \citep{ryan-etal-2024-unintended, alkhamissi-etal-2024-investigating} and produce biased generations \cite{naous-etal-2024-beer} due to a lack of cultural knowledge and competence. Evaluation of LLMs for cultural awareness and alignment is particularly challenging due to the lack of proper evaluation metrics and unavailability of culturally grounded datasets representing the vast complexity of cultures at the regional and sub-regional levels. Existing datasets for culture specific items (CSIs) focus primarily on concepts at the regional level and may contain false positives. To address this issue, we introduce a novel CSI dataset for Indian culture, belonging to 17 cultural facets. The dataset comprises ~8k cultural concepts from 36 sub-regions. To measure the cultural competence of LLMs on a cultural text adaptation task, we evaluate the adaptations using the CSIs created, LLM as Judge, and human evaluations from diverse socio-demographic region. Furthermore, we perform quantitative analysis demonstrating selective sub-regional coverage and surface-level adaptations across all considered LLMs. Our dataset is available here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nlip/DIWALI, project webpage https://nlip-lab.github.io/nlip/publications/diwali/, and our codebase with model outputs can be found here: https://github.com/pramitsahoo/culture-evaluation
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DIWALI: Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Context
Sahoo, Pramit
Brahma, Maharaj
Desarkar, Maunendra Sankar
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in various tasks and applications. However, despite their wide capabilities, they are shown to lack cultural alignment \citep{ryan-etal-2024-unintended, alkhamissi-etal-2024-investigating} and produce biased generations \cite{naous-etal-2024-beer} due to a lack of cultural knowledge and competence. Evaluation of LLMs for cultural awareness and alignment is particularly challenging due to the lack of proper evaluation metrics and unavailability of culturally grounded datasets representing the vast complexity of cultures at the regional and sub-regional levels. Existing datasets for culture specific items (CSIs) focus primarily on concepts at the regional level and may contain false positives. To address this issue, we introduce a novel CSI dataset for Indian culture, belonging to 17 cultural facets. The dataset comprises ~8k cultural concepts from 36 sub-regions. To measure the cultural competence of LLMs on a cultural text adaptation task, we evaluate the adaptations using the CSIs created, LLM as Judge, and human evaluations from diverse socio-demographic region. Furthermore, we perform quantitative analysis demonstrating selective sub-regional coverage and surface-level adaptations across all considered LLMs. Our dataset is available here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nlip/DIWALI, project webpage https://nlip-lab.github.io/nlip/publications/diwali/, and our codebase with model outputs can be found here: https://github.com/pramitsahoo/culture-evaluation
title DIWALI: Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Context
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17399