Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluation
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866913000906031104 |
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| author | Zhao, Lingjun Ki, Dayeon Carpuat, Marine Daumé III, Hal |
| author_facet | Zhao, Lingjun Ki, Dayeon Carpuat, Marine Daumé III, Hal |
| contents | Language models are known to exhibit various forms of cultural bias in decision-making tasks, yet much less is known about their degree of cultural familiarity in open-ended text generation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the task of culturally-adapted art description generation, where models describe artworks for audiences from different cultural groups who vary in their familiarity with the cultural symbols and narratives embedded in the artwork. To evaluate cultural competence in this pragmatic generation task, we propose a framework based on culturally grounded question answering. We find that base models are only marginally adequate for this task, but, through a pragmatic speaker model, we can improve simulated listener comprehension by up to 8.2%. A human study further confirms that the model with higher pragmatic competence is rated as more helpful for comprehension by 8.0%. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02557 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluation Zhao, Lingjun Ki, Dayeon Carpuat, Marine Daumé III, Hal Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction Language models are known to exhibit various forms of cultural bias in decision-making tasks, yet much less is known about their degree of cultural familiarity in open-ended text generation tasks. In this paper, we introduce the task of culturally-adapted art description generation, where models describe artworks for audiences from different cultural groups who vary in their familiarity with the cultural symbols and narratives embedded in the artwork. To evaluate cultural competence in this pragmatic generation task, we propose a framework based on culturally grounded question answering. We find that base models are only marginally adequate for this task, but, through a pragmatic speaker model, we can improve simulated listener comprehension by up to 8.2%. A human study further confirms that the model with higher pragmatic competence is rated as more helpful for comprehension by 8.0%. |
| title | Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluation |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02557 |