# CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18189/) (2023)
- [A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05070/) (2024)
- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Having Beer after Prayer? Measuring Cultural Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14456/) (2023)
- [Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13231/) (2024)
- [What's In My Big Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20707/) (2023)
- [Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07763/) (2022)
- [Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15018/) (2024)
- [Massively Multi-Cultural Knowledge Acquisition & LM Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09369/) (2024)
- [NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17008/) (2023)
- [Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01857/) (2023)
- [CultureLLM: Incorporating Cultural Differences into Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10946/) (2024)
- [Evaluation of African American Language Bias in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14291/) (2023)
- [COPAL-ID: Indonesian Language Reasoning with Local Culture and Nuances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01012/) (2023)
- [EtiCor: Corpus for Analyzing LLMs for Etiquettes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18974/) (2023)
- [GeoMLAMA: Geo-Diverse Commonsense Probing on Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12247/) (2022)
- [Global Voices, Local Biases: Socio-Cultural Prejudices across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17586/) (2023)
- [DLAMA: A Framework for Curating Culturally Diverse Facts for Probing the Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05076/) (2023)
- [What Do Llamas Really Think? Revealing Preference Biases in Language Model Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18812/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Cultural and Social Awareness of LLM Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23252/) (2024)
- [Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12057/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11565/) (2024)
- [Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11661/) (2024)
- [Presumed Cultural Identity: How Names Shape LLM Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11995/) (2025)
- [Multiple LLM Agents Debate for Equitable Cultural Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24671/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11072/) (2024)
- [The Case for "Thick Evaluations" of Cultural Representation in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19075/) (2025)
- [SANSKRITI: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models' Knowledge of Indian Culture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15355/) (2025)
- [CulFiT: A Fine-grained Cultural-aware LLM Training Paradigm via Multilingual Critique Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19484/) (2025)
- [Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07908/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models Through a Global Lens: Are They Culturally Inclusive?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08914/) (2025)
- [Beyond Words: Exploring Cultural Value Sensitivity in Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14906/) (2025)
- [Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21476/) (2025)
- [Susu Box or Piggy Bank: Assessing Cultural Commonsense Knowledge between Ghana and the U.S](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16451/) (2024)
- [CVLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Vision-Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01081/) (2024)
- [Attributing Culture-Conditioned Generations to Pretraining Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20760/) (2024)
- [Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09637/) (2025)
- [Steerable Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Few-Shot Comparative Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08509/) (2025)
- [Tears or Cheers? Benchmarking LLMs via Culturally Elicited Distinct Affective Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13024/) (2026)
- ["A Woman is More Culturally Knowledgeable than A Man?": The Effect of Personas on Cultural Norm Interpretation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11636/) (2024)
- [Cross-Lingual Transfer of Cultural Knowledge: An Asymmetric Phenomenon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01675/) (2025)
- [To Mask or to Mirror: Human-AI Alignment in Collective Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01924/) (2025)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Steerable Pluralistic Value Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18526/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Cultural Kaleidoscope: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Sensitivity in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12880/) (2024)
- [KAHANI: Culturally-Nuanced Visual Storytelling Tool for Non-Western Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19419/) (2024)
- [Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17855/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the utilization of large language models (LLMs) has proliferated world-wide, it is crucial for them to have adequate knowledge and fair representation for diverse global cultures. In this work, we uncover culture perceptions of three SOTA models on 110 countries and regions on 8 culture-related topics through culture-conditioned generations, and extract symbols from these generations that are associated to each culture by the LLM. We discover that culture-conditioned generation consist of linguistic "markers" that distinguish marginalized cultures apart from default cultures. We also discover that LLMs have an uneven degree of diversity in the culture symbols, and that cultures from different geographic regions have different presence in LLMs' culture-agnostic generation. Our findings promote further research in studying the knowledge and fairness of global culture perception in LLMs. Code and Data can be found here: https://github.com/huihanlhh/Culture-Gen/