Reading between the Lines: Can LLMs Identify Cross-Cultural Communication Gaps?
Sougata Saha, Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Harshit Gupta, Monojit Choudhury
Abstract
In a rapidly globalizing and digital world, content such as book and product reviews created by people from diverse cultures are read and consumed by others from different corners of the world. In this paper, we investigate the extent and patterns of gaps in understandability of book reviews due to the presence of culturally-specific items and elements that might be alien to users from another culture. Our user-study on 57 book reviews from Goodreads reveal that 83% of the reviews had at least one culture-specific difficult-to-understand element. We also evaluate the efficacy of GPT-4o in identifying such items, given the cultural background of the reader; the results are mixed, implying a significant scope for improvement. Our datasets are available here: https://github.com/sougata-ub/reading_between_lines.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{saha-etal-2025-reading,
title = "Reading between the Lines: Can {LLM}s Identify Cross-Cultural Communication Gaps?",
author = "Saha, Sougata and
Pandey, Saurabh Kumar and
Gupta, Harshit and
Choudhury, Monojit",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.409/",
pages = "8043--8067",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}