mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2310.12481 ↗First posted 19 Oct 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 42

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Abstract (arXiv)

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. Our study emphasizes the need to critically examine cultural dominance and ethical consideration in their development and deployment. We show that two straightforward methods in model development (i.e., pretraining on more diverse data) and deployment (e.g., culture-aware prompting) can significantly mitigate the cultural dominance issue in LLMs.

Key facts. Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 10 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2023.

Builds on

10 of 55 references.

References · 10

  1. 2023BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Datasetcited by 828
  2. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 759
  3. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 506
  4. 2021BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generationcited by 410
  5. 2023GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Ciphercited by 401
  6. 2023The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientationcited by 183
  7. 2023Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models: An Explanatory Analysis Based on Hofstede's Cultural Dimensionscited by 111
  8. 2022The Ghost in the Machine has an American accent: value conflict in GPT-3cited by 105
  9. 2023ChatGPT or Grammarly? Evaluating ChatGPT on Grammatical Error Correction Benchmarkcited by 77
  10. 2021ERNIE 3.0 Titan: Exploring Larger-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generationcited by 45

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 21; 2025: 13; 2026: 8.

42 papers.

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  1. 2024PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preferencecited by 252
  2. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 206
  3. 2024The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 136
  4. 2024PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignmentcited by 71
  5. 2024Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMscited by 55
  6. 2024CultureLLM: Incorporating Cultural Differences into Large Language Modelscited by 49
  7. 2025CultureVLM: Characterizing and Improving Cultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models for over 100 Countriescited by 40
  8. 2024Self-Pluralising Culture Alignment for Large Language Modelscited by 31
  9. 2024Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Artcited by 26
  10. 2024CulturePark: Boosting Cross-cultural Understanding in Large Language Modelscited by 24
  11. 2024Mapping the Ethics of Generative AI: A Comprehensive Scoping Reviewcited by 19
  12. 2024Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Surveycited by 18
30 more
  1. 2025The Case for "Thick Evaluations" of Cultural Representation in AIcited by 16
  2. 2024On Catastrophic Inheritance of Large Foundation Modelscited by 15
  3. 2024Vox Populi, Vox AI? Using Language Models to Estimate German Public Opinioncited by 13
  4. 2024Fairness Testing of Large Language Models in Role-Playingcited by 10
  5. 2024CVLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Vision-Language Understanding Evaluationcited by 8
  6. 2025Religious Bias Landscape in Language and Text-to-Image Models: Analysis, Detection, and Debiasing Strategiescited by 8
  7. 2025On the Failure of Latent State Persistence in Large Language Modelscited by 8
  8. 2024NewTerm: Benchmarking Real-Time New Terms for Large Language Models with Annual Updatescited by 7
  9. 2025Benchmarking Overton Pluralism in LLMscited by 7
  10. 2024Unveiling and Mitigating Bias in Large Language Model Recommendations: A Path to Fairnesscited by 6
  11. 2024United in Diversity? Contextual Biases in LLM-Based Predictions of the 2024 European Parliament Electionscited by 5
  12. 2025CAReDiO: Cultural Alignment via Representativeness and Distinctiveness Guided Data Optimizationcited by 5
  13. 2025DIWALI: Diversity and Inclusivity aWare cuLture specific Items for India: Dataset and Assessment of LLMs for Cultural Text Adaptation in Indian Contextcited by 5
  14. 2025Counterfactual Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Value Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 5
  15. 2025One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoningcited by 4
  16. 2025Through the Prism of Culture: Evaluating LLMs' Understanding of Indian Subcultures and Traditionscited by 3
  17. 2025DaKultur: Evaluating the Cultural Awareness of Language Models for Danish with Native Speakerscited by 3
  18. 2026Language of Thought Shapes Output Diversity in Large Language Modelscited by 3
  19. 2026In Agents We Trust, but Who Do Agents Trust? Latent Source Preferences Steer LLM Generationscited by 3
  20. 2024RoMath: A Mathematical Reasoning Benchmark in Romaniancited by 2
  21. 2024Exploring Cross-lingual Latent Transplantation: Mutual Opportunities and Open Challengescited by 1
  22. 2025Policy-Grounded Safety Evaluation of 20 Large Language Modelscited by 1
  23. 2026Distributional Open-Ended Evaluation of LLM Cultural Value Alignment Based on Value Codebookcited by 1
  24. 2026DVMap: Fine-Grained Pluralistic Value Alignment via High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mappingcited by 1
  25. 2026CounterCount: A Diagnostic Framework for Counting Bias in Vision Language Modelscited by 1
  26. 2026The Language of the Question Selects the Market: Query Language and Exit IP as Separable Factors in Commercial Recommendations from a Generative Search Interfacecited by 1
  27. 2024Generative AI, Pragmatics, and Authenticity in Second Language Learningcited by 0
  28. 2025Reasoning Shapes Alignment: Investigating Cultural Alignment in Large Reasoning Models with Cultural Normscited by 0
  29. 2026Beyond Facts: Benchmarking Distributional Reading Comprehension in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  30. 2026Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMscited by 0