NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery

Minki Hong, Jangho Choi, Jihie Kim


Abstract
Social norms govern culturally appropriate behavior in communication, enabling dialogue systems to produce responses that are not only coherent but also socially acceptable. We present NormGenesis, a multicultural framework for generating and annotating socially grounded dialogues across English, Chinese, and Korean. To model the dynamics of social interaction beyond static norm classification, we propose a novel dialogue type, Violation-to-Resolution (V2R), which models the progression of conversations following norm violations through recognition and socially appropriate repair. To improve pragmatic consistency in underrepresented languages, we implement an exemplar-based iterative refinement early in the dialogue synthesis process. This design introduces alignment with linguistic, emotional, and sociocultural expectations before full dialogue generation begins. Using this framework, we construct a dataset of 10,800 multi-turn dialogues annotated at the turn level for norm adherence, speaker intent, and emotional response. Human and LLM-based evaluations demonstrate that NormGenesis significantly outperforms existing datasets in refinement quality, dialogue naturalness, and generalization performance. We show that models trained on our V2R-augmented data exhibit improved pragmatic competence in ethically sensitive contexts. Our work establishes a new benchmark for culturally adaptive dialogue modeling and provides a scalable methodology for norm-aware generation across linguistically and culturally diverse languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1715
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33781–33819
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1715/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minki Hong, Jangho Choi, and Jihie Kim. 2025. NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 33781–33819, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery (Hong et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1715.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1715.checklist.pdf