WorldValuesBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Cultural Value Awareness of Language Models

Abstract

The awareness of multi-cultural human values is critical to the ability of language models (LMs) to generate safe and personalized responses. However, this awareness of LMs has been insufficiently studied, since the computer science community lacks access to the large-scale real-world data about multi-cultural values. In this paper, we present WorldValuesBench, a globally diverse, large-scale benchmark dataset for the multi-cultural value prediction task, which requires a model to generate a rating response to a value question based on demographic contexts. Our dataset is derived from an influential social science project, World Values Survey (WVS), that has collected answers to hundreds of value questions (e.g., social, economic, ethical) from 94,728 participants worldwide. We have constructed more than 20 million examples of the type "(demographic attributes, value question) → answer” from the WVS responses. We perform a case study using our dataset and show that the task is challenging for strong open and closed-source models. On merely 11.1%, 25.0%, 72.2%, and 75.0% of the questions, Alpaca-7B, Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1, and GPT-3.5 Turbo can respectively achieve <0.2 Wasserstein 1-distance from the human normalized answer distributions. WorldValuesBench opens up new research avenues in studying limitations and opportunities in multi-cultural value awareness of LMs.