# Modeling Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference with Codenames Duet

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02475 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02475/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13312/) (2022)
- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [Reasoning About Pragmatics with Neural Listeners and Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00562/) (2016)
- [Colors in Context: A Pragmatic Neural Model for Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10186/) (2017)
- [Unified Pragmatic Models for Generating and Following Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04987/) (2017)
- [Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialog Challenge for Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07109/) (2022)
- [Pragmatically Informative Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01301/) (2019)
- [Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13685/) (2022)
- [Putting the Con in Context: Identifying Deceptive Actors in the Game of Mafia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02253/) (2022)
- [Planning, Inference and Pragmatics in Sequential Language Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11774/) (2018)
- [Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00012/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Language Games for Advanced Natural Language Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01622/) (2019)
- [Playing Codenames with Language Graphs and Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05885/) (2021)
- [Infant directed speech is consistent with teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01175/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12057/) (2025)
- [Are Multilingual LLMs Culturally-Diverse Reasoners? An Investigation into Multicultural Proverbs and Sayings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08591/) (2023)
- [Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12378/) (2025)
- [Navigating Rifts in Human-LLM Grounding: Study and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13975/) (2025)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11565/) (2024)
- [How Well Do LLMs Identify Cultural Unity in Diversity?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05102/) (2024)
- [The Decrypto Benchmark for Multi-Agent Reasoning and Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20664/) (2025)
- [The Pragmatic Mind of Machines: Tracing the Emergence of Pragmatic Competence in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18497/) (2025)
- [Communicate to Play: Pragmatic Reasoning for Efficient Cross-Cultural Communication in Codenames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04900/) (2024)
- [Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27672/) (2025)
- [Ad-hoc Concept Forming in the Game Codenames as a Means for Evaluating Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11707/) (2025)
- [Designing Beyond Language: Sociotechnical Barriers in AI Health Technologies for Limited English Proficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07277/) (2025)
- [HCAG: Hierarchical Abstraction and Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Theoretical Repositories with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20299/) (2026)
- [Consistency Without Alignment: Item-Sensitive Language Models Indistinguishable From Random](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00576/) (2026)
- [Pragmatics Meets Culture: Culturally-adapted Artwork Description Generation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02557/) (2026)
- [VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01788/) (2026)
- [CultureMINE: Datasets and Methods for Improving the Cultural Capabilities of NLP Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22494/) (2026)
- [FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pragmatic reference enables efficient interpersonal communication. Prior work uses simple reference games to test models of pragmatic reasoning, often with unidentified speakers and listeners. In practice, however, speakers' sociocultural background shapes their pragmatic assumptions. For example, readers of this paper assume NLP refers to "Natural Language Processing," and not "Neuro-linguistic Programming." This work introduces the Cultural Codes dataset, which operationalizes sociocultural pragmatic inference in a simple word reference game. Cultural Codes is based on the multi-turn collaborative two-player game, Codenames Duet. Our dataset consists of 794 games with 7,703 turns, distributed across 153 unique players. Alongside gameplay, we collect information about players' personalities, values, and demographics. Utilizing theories of communication and pragmatics, we predict each player's actions via joint modeling of their sociocultural priors and the game context. Our experiments show that accounting for background characteristics significantly improves model performance for tasks related to both clue giving and guessing, indicating that sociocultural priors play a vital role in gameplay decisions.