Bridging Cultural Nuances in Dialogue Agents through Cultural Value Surveys

Yong Cao, Min Chen, Daniel Hershcovich


Abstract
The cultural landscape of interactions with dialogue agents is a compelling yet relatively unexplored territory. It’s clear that various sociocultural aspects—from communication styles and beliefs to shared metaphors and knowledge—profoundly impact these interactions. To delve deeper into this dynamic, we introduce cuDialog, a first-of-its-kind benchmark for dialogue generation with a cultural lens. We also develop baseline models capable of extracting cultural attributes from dialogue exchanges, with the goal of enhancing the predictive accuracy and quality of dialogue agents. To effectively co-learn cultural understanding and multi-turn dialogue predictions, we propose to incorporate cultural dimensions with dialogue encoding features. Our experimental findings highlight that incorporating cultural value surveys boosts alignment with references and cultural markers, demonstrating its considerable influence on personalization and dialogue quality. To facilitate further exploration in this exciting domain, we publish our benchmark publicly accessible at https://github.com/yongcaoplus/cuDialog.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.63
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
929–945
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-eacl.63/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yong Cao, Min Chen, and Daniel Hershcovich. 2024. Bridging Cultural Nuances in Dialogue Agents through Cultural Value Surveys. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 929–945, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Cultural Nuances in Dialogue Agents through Cultural Value Surveys (Cao et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-eacl.63.pdf