# NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05709/) (2019)
- [Efficient Few-Shot Learning Without Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11055/) (2022)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [NormSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08604/) (2022)
- [Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09072/) (2022)
- [SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12026/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Hierarchical Models for Predicting Persuasive Strategies in Good-faith Textual Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06351/) (2021)
- [COSMO: Conditional SEQ2SEQ-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00777/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Processing for Dialects of a Language: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05632/) (2024)
- [Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12057/) (2025)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [Bridging Cultural Nuances in Dialogue Agents through Cultural Value Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10352/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model's ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.