# Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14456 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/

## Key facts

- Cited by 153 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 125 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10561/) (2019)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08283/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17466/) (2023)
- [Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04054/) (2021)
- [The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01768/) (2023)
- [Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11790/) (2021)
- [Detecting Emergent Intersectional Biases: Contextualized Word Embeddings Contain a Distribution of Human-like Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03955/) (2020)
- [ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01785/) (2020)
- ["I'm sorry to hear that": Finding New Biases in Language Models with a Holistic Descriptor Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09209/) (2022)
- [Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13722/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 153)

- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [BLEnD: A Benchmark for LLMs on Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09948/) (2024)
- [Monitoring AI-Modified Content at Scale: A Case Study on the Impact of ChatGPT on AI Conference Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07183/) (2024)
- [Cultural Bias and Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14096/) (2023)
- [Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15951/) (2024)
- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [CultureBank: An Online Community-Driven Knowledge Base Towards Culturally Aware Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15238/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00929/) (2024)
- [Towards Conversational Diagnostic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05654/) (2024)
- [Do Multilingual LLMs Think In English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15603/) (2025)
- [Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15018/) (2024)
- [CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10199/) (2024)
- [ALLaM: Large Language Models for Arabic and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15390/) (2024)
- [CultureLLM: Incorporating Cultural Differences into Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10946/) (2024)
- [AraDiCE: Benchmarks for Dialectal and Cultural Capabilities in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11404/) (2024)
- [CultureVLM: Characterizing and Improving Cultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models for over 100 Countries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01282/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Cultural Adaptability of a Large Language Model via Simulation of Synthetic Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06929/) (2024)
- [Controllable Safety Alignment: Inference-Time Adaptation to Diverse Safety Requirements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08968/) (2024)
- [CaLMQA: Exploring culturally specific long-form question answering across 23 languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17761/) (2024)
- [Beyond Aesthetics: Cultural Competence in Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06863/) (2024)
- [NativQA: Multilingual Culturally-Aligned Natural Query for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09823/) (2024)
- [CulturalTeaming: AI-Assisted Interactive Red-Teaming for Challenging LLMs' (Lack of) Multicultural Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06664/) (2024)
- [An Evaluation of Cultural Value Alignment in LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08863/) (2025)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [MEXA: Multilingual Evaluation of English-Centric LLMs via Cross-Lingual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05873/) (2024)
- [CulturePark: Boosting Cross-cultural Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15145/) (2024)
- [BertaQA: How Much Do Language Models Know About Local Culture?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07302/) (2024)
- [Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11005/) (2024)
- [High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07900/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the reach of large language models (LMs) expands globally, their ability to cater to diverse cultural contexts becomes crucial. Despite advancements in multilingual capabilities, models are not designed with appropriate cultural nuances. In this paper, we show that multilingual and Arabic monolingual LMs exhibit bias towards entities associated with Western culture. We introduce CAMeL, a novel resource of 628 naturally-occurring prompts and 20,368 entities spanning eight types that contrast Arab and Western cultures. CAMeL provides a foundation for measuring cultural biases in LMs through both extrinsic and intrinsic evaluations. Using CAMeL, we examine the cross-cultural performance in Arabic of 16 different LMs on tasks such as story generation, NER, and sentiment analysis, where we find concerning cases of stereotyping and cultural unfairness. We further test their text-infilling performance, revealing the incapability of appropriate adaptation to Arab cultural contexts. Finally, we analyze 6 Arabic pre-training corpora and find that commonly used sources such as Wikipedia may not be best suited to build culturally aware LMs, if used as they are without adjustment. We will make CAMeL publicly available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/camel