CULTURALLY YOURS: A Reading Assistant for Cross-Cultural Content
Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Harshit Budhiraja, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
Abstract
Users from diverse cultural backgrounds frequently face challenges in understanding content from various online sources that are written by people from a different culture. This paper presents CULTURALLY YOURS (CY), a first-of-its-kind cultural reading assistant tool designed to identify culture-specific items (CSIs) for users from varying cultural contexts. By leveraging principles of relevance feedback and using culture as a prior, our tool personalizes to the user’s preferences based on the interaction of the user with the tool. CY can be powered by any LLM that can reason with cultural background of the user and the input text in English, provided as a part of the prompt that are iteratively refined as the user keeps interacting with the system. In this demo, we use GPT-4o as the back-end. We conduct a user study across 13 users from 8 different geographies. The results demonstrate CY’s effectiveness in enhancing user engagement and personalization alongside comprehension of cross-cultural content.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{pandey-etal-2025-culturally,
title = "{CULTURALLY} {YOURS}: A Reading Assistant for Cross-Cultural Content",
author = "Pandey, Saurabh Kumar and
Budhiraja, Harshit and
Saha, Sougata and
Choudhury, Monojit",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven and
Mather, Brodie and
Dras, Mark",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-demos.21/",
pages = "208--216"
}