# SEADialogues: A Multilingual Culturally Grounded Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset on Southeast Asian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [A Study of Generative Large Language Model for Medical Research and Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13523/) (2023)
- [Top2Vec: Distributed Representations of Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09470/) (2020)
- [MuTual: A Dataset for Multi-Turn Dialogue Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04494/) (2020)
- [Multi-IF: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn and Multilingual Instructions Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15553/) (2024)
- [doc2dial: A Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06623/) (2020)
- [Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09672/) (2019)
- [One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13357/) (2022)
- [Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12757/) (2020)
- [M-Prometheus: A Suite of Open Multilingual LLM Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04953/) (2025)
- [XPersona: Evaluating Multilingual Personalized Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07568/) (2020)
- [BotChat: Evaluating LLMs' Capabilities of Having Multi-Turn Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13650/) (2023)
- [GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07679/) (2021)
- [Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10400/) (2022)
- [CulturalBench: A Robust, Diverse, and Challenging Cultural Benchmark by Human-AI CulturalTeaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02677/) (2024)
- [R3: Robust Rubric-Agnostic Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13388/) (2025)
- [Cultural Commonsense Knowledge for Intercultural Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10689/) (2024)
- [DiaSynth: Synthetic Dialogue Generation Framework for Low Resource Dialogue Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19020/) (2024)
- [PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08954/) (2023)
- [Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14031/) (2023)
- [T1: A Tool-Oriented Conversational Dataset for Multi-Turn Agentic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16986/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Gained in Translation: Privileged Pairwise Judges Enhance Multilingual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18722/) (2026)
- [GAIA-v2-LILT: Multilingual Adaptation of Agent Benchmark beyond Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24929/) (2026)
- [CultureTalk-ID: A Multi-Task Dialogue Benchmark for Cultural Commonsense in Indonesian Local Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21016/) (2026)
- [CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28405/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although numerous datasets have been developed to support dialogue systems, most existing chit-chat datasets overlook the cultural nuances inherent in natural human conversations. To address this gap, we introduce SEADialogues, a culturally grounded dialogue dataset centered on Southeast Asia, a region with over 700 million people and immense cultural diversity. Our dataset features dialogues in eight languages from six Southeast Asian countries, many of which are low-resource despite having sizable speaker populations. To enhance cultural relevance and personalization, each dialogue includes persona attributes and two culturally grounded topics that reflect everyday life in the respective communities. Furthermore, we release a multi-turn dialogue dataset to advance research on culturally aware and human-centric large language models, including conversational dialogue agents.