Understanding the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models for Cultural Commonsense
Siqi Shen, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Soujanya Poria, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial commonsense understanding through numerous benchmark evaluations. However, their understanding of cultural commonsense remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the capabilities and limitations of several state-of-the-art LLMs in the context of cultural commonsense tasks. Using several general and cultural commonsense benchmarks, we find that (1) LLMs have a significant discrepancy in performance when tested on culture-specific commonsense knowledge for different cultures; (2) LLMs’ general commonsense capability is affected by cultural context; and (3) The language used to query the LLMs can impact their performance on cultural-related tasks.Our study points to the inherent bias in the cultural understanding of LLMs and provides insights that can help develop culturally-aware language models.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{shen-etal-2024-understanding,
title = "Understanding the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models for Cultural Commonsense",
author = "Shen, Siqi and
Logeswaran, Lajanugen and
Lee, Moontae and
Lee, Honglak and
Poria, Soujanya and
Mihalcea, Rada",
editor = "Duh, Kevin and
Gomez, Helena and
Bethard, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jun,
year = "2024",
address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.316/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.316",
pages = "5668--5680"
}