Not All Countries Celebrate Thanksgiving: On the Cultural Dominance in Large Language Models

Understand

This paper identifies a cultural dominance issue within large language models (LLMs) due to the predominant use of English data in model training (e.g., ChatGPT).

• LLMs often provide inappropriate English-culture-related answers that are not relevant to the expected culture when users ask in non-English languages.
• To systematically evaluate the cultural dominance issue, we build a benchmark of concrete (e.g., holidays and songs) and abstract (e.g., values and opinions) cultural objects.
• Empirical results show that the representative GPT models suffer from the culture dominance problem, where GPT-4 is the most affected while text-davinci-003 suffers the least from this problem.