# Culturally-Nuanced Story Generation for Reasoning in Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Javanese and Sundanese

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
- [Generative AI for Synthetic Data Generation: Methods, Challenges and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04190/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Same Lesson, Different Story: Cross-Lingual Reconstruction of Cultural Narratives in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24610/) (2026)
- [Toward Culturally Grounded Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Culturally grounded commonsense reasoning is underexplored in low-resource languages due to scarce data and costly native annotation. We test whether large language models (LLMs) can generate culturally nuanced narratives for such settings. Focusing on Javanese and Sundanese, we compare three data creation strategies: (1) LLM-assisted stories prompted with cultural cues, (2) machine translation from Indonesian benchmarks, and (3) native-written stories. Human evaluation finds LLM stories match natives on cultural fidelity but lag in coherence and correctness. We fine-tune models on each dataset and evaluate on a human-authored test set for classification and generation. LLM-generated data yields higher downstream performance than machine-translated and Indonesian human-authored training data. We release a high-quality benchmark of culturally grounded commonsense stories in Javanese and Sundanese to support future work.