# MINDS: A Cross-cultural Dialogue Corpus for Social Norm Classification and Adherence Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09918 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09918/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Conversational and speech RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Conversational and speech RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/conversational-and-speech-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07574/) (2021)
- [ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12688/) (2022)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06939/) (2018)
- [NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17008/) (2023)
- [NormSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08604/) (2022)
- [NormDial: A Comparable Bilingual Synthetic Dialog Dataset for Modeling Social Norm Adherence and Violation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14563/) (2023)
- [Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14492/) (2023)
- [DREAM: Improving Situational QA by First Elaborating the Situation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08656/) (2021)
- [RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11178/) (2024)

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

- [EUDAIMONIA: Evaluating Undesirable Dynamics in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30654/) (2026)
- [RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17301/) (2026)
- [Whisper-Based Speech Transcription from Videos Across Multiple Languages for Cross-Cultural Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11772/) (2026)
- [FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social norms are implicit, culturally grounded expectations that guide interpersonal communication. Unlike factual commonsense, norm reasoning is subjective, context-dependent, and varies across cultures, posing challenges for computational models. Prior works provide valuable normative annotations but mostly target isolated utterances or synthetic dialogues, limiting their ability to capture the fluid, multi-turn nature of real-world conversations. In this work, we present Norm-RAG, a retrieval-augmented, agentic framework for nuanced social norm inference in multi-turn dialogues. Norm-RAG models utterance-level attributes including communicative intent, speaker roles, interpersonal framing, and linguistic cues and grounds them in structured normative documentation retrieved via a novel Semantic Chunking approach. This enables interpretable and context-aware reasoning about norm adherence and violation across multilingual dialogues. We further introduce MINDS (Multilingual Interactions with Norm-Driven Speech), a bilingual dataset comprising 31 multi-turn Mandarin-English and Spanish-English conversations. Each turn is annotated for norm category and adherence status using multi-annotator consensus, reflecting cross-cultural and realistic norm expression. Our experiments show that Norm-RAG improves norm detection and generalization, demonstrates improved performance for culturally adaptive and socially intelligent dialogue systems.