@article{pawar-etal-2025-survey,
    title = "Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond",
    author = "Pawar, Siddhesh  and
      Park, Junyeong  and
      Jin, Jiho  and
      Arora, Arnav  and
      Myung, Junho  and
      Yadav, Srishti  and
      Haznitrama, Faiz Ghifari  and
      Song, Inhwa  and
      Oh, Alice  and
      Augenstein, Isabelle",
    journal = "Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "51",
    number = "3",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2025.cl-3.7/",
    doi = "10.1162/coli.a.14",
    pages = "907--1004",
    abstract = "Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive, going beyond multilinguality and building on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this article, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking definitions of culture from the anthropology and psychology literature as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of human{--}computer interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.1"
}